The Pursuit And Recognition Of Self In Chinese American Women’s Literature From Sui Sin Far To Amy Tan

Chinese American women’s literature has become an important branch in American literature since the late nineteenth century. After Sui Sin Far, a lot of Chinese American women writers have emerged to promote Chinese American women’s literature to a higher rank. With their characteristically female point of view, they have an attempt to reflect and explore their ethnic history and Chinese traditional culture, to record and recreate the life of their parents and their own, which is a continuous revision to the pursuit and recognition of self.Despite the fact that Chinese American women’s literature has existed for about one hundred years, it has been ignored by critics for a long time. Fortunately, the study of Chinese American women’s literature is becoming a new trend nowadays.There are few studies on Chinese American women writers and their writings on abroad, until the publication of Amy Ling’s Between Worlds:Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (1990), a contextual study with a feminist effort at recovering Chinese American women writers’literary history. Since its publication, more monographs on Chinese American women’s literature began to appear, such as Xiao-Huang Yin’s Chinese American Women’s Literature Since the1850s (2000), which provides a comprehensive history of Chinese American women’s literature.In recent years, more and more domestic scholars have turned their attention to Chinese American women’s literature. Zhang Longhai, who published a monograph on the historical study of Chinese Americans’identity crisis entitled Identity and History:Reading Chinese American Literature in2004, is one of them. Shi Pingping, a woman scholar, studies the sexual and racial factors that affect Chinese American women’s literature in her monograph The Mother-Daughter Relationship and the Politics of Gender and Race:A study of Chinese American Women s Writings (2004).Till now, numerous papers can be found in various journals, both at home and abroad. They either give brief introduction to Chinese American women’s literature or make study on specific author or individual text, few concerns changes happening in the pursuit and recognition of self in Chinese American women’s literature.This thesis, different from most critical writings, will look into four Chinese American women writers of different times and their representative works to elaborate the changes of the pursuit and recognition of self in Chinese American women’s literature. Through this thesis, the author also hopes to present an alternative view and thus broaden the study of Chinese American women’s literature.Inspired by Stuart Hall’s theory of identity, the author hopes to contribute to the study of Chinese American women’s literature and come to the conclusion that from Sui Sin Far’s Chinese daughter to Jade Snow Wong’s model minority, to Maxine Hong Kingston’s woman warrior, and to Amy Tan’s Chinese American daughter, the self pursued and recognized by Chinese American women writers is always changing according to different historical background.