An Unceasing Quest: Unraveling The Identity Negotiation Of American-Born Chinese

This thesis has investigated the cultural borderlands living and unraveled theself-identifications of the American-born Chinese daughters by conducting adiscourse analysis of the film The Joy Luck Club (1993).By drawing upon Stella Ting-Toomey’s (2005) definitions of “identity”,“negotiation”,and “identity negotiation”, gaining inspirations from Stella Ting-Toomey’s (2005)Identity Negotiation Theory (INT), Jackson’s (1999) Cultural Contract Theory (CCT),and Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) independent self-construals and interdependentself-construals, and taking the discourse system developed by the Scollons (2000) as aframework, this thesis has completed an investigation into the American-born Chinesedaughters’ identity negotiation and reconstruction.The author has made hypotheses that the American-born Chinese daughters in thefilm would go through three different stages of identity negotiation, namely: negativeidentity negotiation, neutral identity negotiation, and positive identity negotiation.When conducting the analysis, the author has selected thirteen scenes and dividedthem into four categories under different themes.The analysis of this study has fully demonstrated that the identity of ChineseAmericans is dynamic and under negotiation and reconstruction all the time. For thesecond-generation Chinese Americans, they have to constantly negotiate theiridentities, and forge a “hybridity” to embrace two cultures to various degrees. In otherwords, they have to draw upon the cultural elements from American culture, while atthe same time embrace the cultural elements that their first-generation parents havebeen trying to pass down. They have to identify and accept their root ethnic Chineseidentity instead of irrationally negate, betray or become indifferent to Chinese culture.Therefore in this way, the second-generation Chinese Americans are in an unceasing quest for their “real” identities.