Paradox Of Salvation

The lengthy masterpiece Saving Fish from Drowning which Amy Tan has spent five years meticulously creating could be regarded as another peak of the writer's recent creations. After the first works The Joy Club came into being in 1989, and The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, and The Bonesetter's Daughter in the following years, Amy Tan has already formed a distinct individual style, since all of these works describe the mother-daughter relationship, involving the identity of Chinese immigrants as well as the cultural differences and integration between the East and the West at the same time. However, Amy Tan, in the novel Saving Fish from Drowning, has made a bold breakthrough and surmounting to change her creative themes and expand her cross-cultural horizons. The thesis, with employment of the relative theories of imago logy of comparative literature, is attempting to profoundly analyze the paradoxical "salvation" theme in the text from the cross-cultural perspective. It is also trying to do a longitudinal and horizontal research on the new developing direction of Chinese-American literature which the works reveals.The paper consists of five parts, including introduction, three chapters and conclusion. In the introduction, an overall statement generalizes the thesis mainly in such aspects like raising questions, present research situation, defining relative concepts, and research methods and so on. The first chapter introduces the "salvation" paradox which the western culture exerts on the eastern culture and also points out that the Orient actually is an integrated system with its own values, opposite to what the western imagine. It does not at all need the occidental one-side "salvation" that can only spoil the integrity of the oriental culture. On the contrary, the process of re-knowing the East is beneficial to the West for it own self-development, realizing the purpose of "self-salvation". The second chapter discusses the male-female gender "salvation" paradox. Based on the deconstruction of both giant western image and inflexible eastern impression, this part relates the subversion of the white's rescuing myth and the reshaping of neo-Chinese female images; meanwhile, it also claims that only can the oriental harmonious internal values be competent to save rather than the Western who is suffering both physically and mentally, because love and communication and understanding which the Eastern values strongly promote contribute a lot. The third chapters develops on the basis of the former chapters, indicating that the value of any salvation, no matter whether is cultural one or inter-human one or human-animal one, should be inspected through several aspects like motives, modes, ways and effects, except for its satisfactory morality, the idea which well justifies what Amy Tan says, " We could not only focus on intention without results to be considered." In the last part, the thesis concludes that Saving Fish from Drowning can be seen as a transitional point for Chinese-American literature directly shifting from traditional Chinese-immigrant writings to the world literature. The works reflects, from the vertical dimension, the historical view of Chinese-American writers; on the other hand, in the horizontal aspect, it as well presents the writers' global perspective, opening the way for the development of Chinese-American literature.