On Awareness Of Cultural Identity Construction In Yan Geling's Novel

Yan Geling is a representative writer of the contemporary New Immigration Literature in North American. Her ways of viewing herself and the world have been shocked and changed greatly by the heterogeneous culture and her life experience. In nature, her writing is a process of cultural identity and construction, which is accompanied with the struggle between the complicated anxiety and eagerness to get rid of the anxiety in the author.The anxiety first appeared in her writing as a marginal person walking in the heterogeneous culture. Yan Geling,who has just entered another country then, was pushed between margins by the stressful life, dignity-seeking efforts as well as cultural shocks and was at a status of exile. It was in such a state that she struggled to find her own identity and destiny.Shaping the image who survived between eastern and western cultures was Yan's first trial to construct the cultural identity. At the beginning of the period she stayed America, she experienced the loss of the ego firstly, then consciously began to look for the ego and tried to find some profound experiences and broader writing fields between sexes, nations and cultures, and overlapped in the subjects the immigrant life with the retrospect in China. A watcher in the fertile field of Chinese culture is an image with which Yan Geling claims she has got rid of her anxiety of cultural identity. Living at margins under multicultural shocks, Yan finally finished her journey from the loss of the ego, then looking for the ego, to identifying the ego. After constructing her identity through writing, at length she came back to look for native materials.All in all, that Yan Geling's cultural identity changed in different periods demonstrates that though works of new immigrant writers keep varying in Chinese literature, they never leave far away from the root.