"saving Fish From Drowning: Breakthrough The Ethnic Boundaries Attempts

Amy Tan is a famous Chinese American writer, whose new book Saving Fish from Drowning is her fifth novel. Compared with her previous four works, this novel has less ethnic color. It indicates more multicultural color on theme, background, and the choice of main characters. In an era when multiculture coexists, many Chinese American writers, African American writers and Jewish American writers try to break through the ethnic boundaries and deal with the problems to which human beings are facing. This work embodies the influence of multiculturalism on Chinese American literature, and provides a new perspective for the further development of Chinese American literature, so it is worth further research and discussion.Combined with"close reading", this paper tries to compare Amy Tan's previous four works with this new one, and analyzes the breakthrough of this new work by using Orientalism and Multiculturalism as the theoretical foundations. This thesis consists of six parts: the first part is the literature review on Amy Tan's works from home and abroad and the introduction of the propose and significance of this thesis; the second part focuses on the two theoretical foundations, Orientalism and Multiculturalism, and their relations with Chinese American literature; the third part analyzes the ethnic color in Tan's four works, which focuses on the theme of Chinese identity seeking, large number of Chinese cultural elements and inevitable Orientalism; the fourth part summarizes the multicultural color of Saving Fish from Drowning through its multiple themes, a great number of multicultural elements and the deconstruction of Orientalism; the fifth part not only discusses the purpose and value of the breakthrough, but also looks into the future development of Chinese American literature from Tan's attempt; the last part is the conclusion.