On Negotiating Chinese American Identity In Fae Myenne Ng's Bone

Fae Myenne Ng. as a Chinese American writer, became popular among the reading public for her first novel Bone, which is about a Chinatown family's survival in the aftermath of one of the daughters' suicide. On its first publication in 1993. it soon became a bestseller and the cult lasted for over 20 years. Being widely anthologized. it also gained popularity with critics.After careful reading of the text and its historical context. the author of the thesis focuses on how the issue of identity is resolved and explicated by retelling and remembering the family stories and their ethnic past. Concerning the protagonists' disintegrated subjectivity and identity, through employing the Lacanian psychoanalytical theory of "the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real" of the ongoing process of subject-formation, this thesis argues that the search for a stable ethnic identity is futile and endless, because in the three Orders coined by Lacan, the real selfhood is never to be seen but is first imagined through a mirror image or familial images, and then is structured in "Father's name," and later obtained in "Full speech"—outside the linguistic system. The argument of my thesis is that the stable ethnic identity is disintegrated, and can be engendered and re-engendered continuously within the intersubjective scope and through different contexts.The thesis is mainly composed of six parts. The first is the literature review both at home and abroad, while the second is an introduction of my research approach—Lacanian Psychoanalysis. The second chapter examines the same terms as defined in Lacan's Ecrits. as well as by other critics of the book. Provided with a profound understanding of Lacan's terms, the thesis is more reasonable. The third chapter, entitled "Second Generation Chinese Americans' Ideal Self—the Imaginary, focuses on Leila as an infant and a child, who cannot perceive her physical completion in the absence of the mother, and her incompletion of childhood leads to her later splitting self while confronted with the loss of her sister Ona. The fourth chapter elaborates on several cultural signs and symbols re-occurring in the novel. such as the naming process, immigrants' sub-narrative—"paper son" and family secrets, to draw a conclusion that the split and dynamic identity is something that is always in the making rather than is given or formed once-for-all. In the fifth chapter. while the Real is located where the disruption of signification has occurred and "I think, therefore I am not," the identity issue is thus bounded with the deconstruction of the old lingual system and the creation of a new one, like the address inscribed in the front of the Leong's house—"updaire." That is where their true identity is found. The last chapter is a conclusion. To sum up the three spheres of identification and subjectivication are mentioned again as various otherization forms.