Chinese Writing--Comparison On Strategies Of American Chinese Literature Writing

The Chinese American criticism between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston is one of the most important literature phenomenon in Asian American literature history in1970’s. The two schools, each represented by Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston, had a series of debates about writing ideas which had a deep influence on later Asian American writers. This paper reviews this debate based on texts in three aspects:rewriting of Chinese traditional literature, autobiography and gender in order to give a comparison between different writing strategies. This difference would show us the different construction in the concept of Asian American Identity and inform the complexity and contradictory in Asian American writing.This paper holds a point that through the different writing strategy the writer would construct his/her own race identity. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote with the oral feature, mixed the true Asian American history with the enchanting creation, in order to rewrite the Asian America history. She had three works and each later works was overlapped the former one, which implied that in her view of the Asian American identity was a becoming concept complied with the freedom and creation. On the other hands, Frank Chin insisted in protecting the Chinese tradition and digging the "heroism" in the Asian American character out of the traditional trait. He also represented the Asian American’s anxiety by writing in mimicry and posted the "Guangdong" as a model in his reconstruction of the male Asian American which showing his ethic mind.The literature value of the Chinese American criticism between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston is relative literature issues rose by the different writing idea instead of the specific items. That is how to handle with different Asian American’s racial emotion and the race identity hold in different Asian American writer. And at the same time the very writing diversity showed us a more multivariant and objective Asian American literature.