On The Hybridity Of Cultural Identity In Typical American

Chinese-American writers Gish Jen is a second generation Chinese American born in New York. She graduated from Harvard University and later studied in Stanford Business School. Typical American is her first novel. This novel begins with the sentence "this is an American story". It successfully draws worldwide attention to a Chinese-American immigrant’s family, and makes readers feel the joy and sorrow that the heroes experienced in the pursuit of American dream as the others on the whites’ land. Gish Jen also motivates the Chinese immigrants to review their understanding of American identity by successfully adopting the theory of hybridity.Through the analysis of other Chinese American writers’ works, it can be easily found that the writing of cultural identity is an important theme which consistently appears in the works of Chinese American writers. However, different writers hold different ideas in their writings. Jade Snow Wong is in favor of assimilating into American culture, while Frank Chin is strongly against Jade Snow Wong’s ideas. Frank Chin claims to keep the Chinese cultural identity, but Maxine Hong Kingston, as one of the contemporary Chinese American writers, advocates writing the cultural identity from the perspective of Chinese legends. Different from the writers discussed above, Gish Jen successfully writes the hybridity of cultural identity in Typical American. In this thesis, the author adopts Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity to reveal Jen’s writing ideas of portraying the Changs as ’others’ in America, fulfilling their rebuilding of cultural identity in the complex society, and finally forming the hybrid cultural identity. In this manner, this thesis illustrates the point that the coexistence of multi-cultures is an inevitable choice in multicultural society. A Blind pursuit of a certain culture will finally lead to tragedies and disasters.The thesis is composed of three chapters, and the first chapter mainly introduces the writings of cultural identity in Chinese American literature. By analyzing the social background and comparing with other Chinese American writers’ideas about the writing of cultural identity, the author wants to exhibit Jen’s unique writing ideas from the perspective of Homi Bhabha’s theory about identity. In chapter two, the author will analyze the Changs’original identity as typical Chinese. Because the protagonists in this novel, including Ralph, Helen and Theresa, all embody the Chinese cultural features after arriving in America. Besides, this chapter also analyzes the identity dilemma that the Changs suffered in America. And this dilemma can be regarded as the reason for their pursuit of American cultural identity. Chapter Three mainly deals with how Gish Jen achieves the writing of the Changs’ hybrid cultural identity in Typical American. After the failure of their pursuit of American identity, the Changs are aware of their misunderstanding about American dream and start to rebuild the hybrid cultural identity in America.