On The Cultural Identity Construction Of Yan Geling 's Novels

As the most powerful new immigrant writer in the contemporary North American Chinese literary, the cumulative impact of different cultures and life experiences continue to affect the ways Yan Geling treating for herself, others and the world. Throughout her entire creative process, the construction of cultural identity awareness runs through them.In this paper, Yan Geling’s novels are divided into four periods according to her self-reflection and the process of searching herself. Fiction theme of each period are selected from the narrative aspects of conversion and the changing of perspective and female consciousness. It shows how Yan Geling constructs her cultural identity from her novel creation.The first chapter studies the strong female consciousness in the burst of political rights before Yan Geling leaving China. She finds the humanity and dignity rediscovered by political through the narrator "I", and then established her existence as a woman full of integrity, independence and freedom.The second chapter discusses the stories caught between Eastern and Western cultures which are narrated calmly in the third person when Yan Geling emigrated to the USA in early days. She highlighting the goodness and beauty of human nature through a series of "weak and not weak" female image to comfort the pain caused by lost identity.The third chapter studies the novels created when Yan Geling settled in the United States. The theme performances in two aspects:immigration experience and looking back to the mainland. Women in novels begin to achieve their desire from forbear and tolerance. The absent narrator "I" returns and Yan Geling uses the approach of "double-temporal narrative" to show her confusion and introspection under the impact of bicultural identity and culture.The fourth chapter studies the novels created when Yan Geling lived in South Africa. She selects the perspective of female to describe those purely Chinese historical themes. These women come from the local folk who have self-belief in the spiritual world, and deal with everything in their own unique way. The author also chooses the perspective of third-person narrative, and the narrator of "I" is absent again, which shows the author’s desire to confirm her cultural identity through personal memory.