Struggling Out Of Ethnicity And Exhibiting Multiculmralism

Amy Tan is one of Chinese American women writers of greatest concern in American literary world. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, published in1989, makes her become famous overnight. It has been in the bestseller list of New York Times for nine months, and has won many awards including the National Book Award. And then, The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) are also very, popular. These four novels depict vividly the conflicts between mothers and daughters in a way of storytelling. Different from her previous novels, Saving Fish from Drowning, published in2005, does not continue to use the motif of seeking Chinese American identity, but chooses the No Name Place in Burma as the background and portrays that twelve American tourists encounter all sorts of cultural conflicts in the Eastern world. In Saving Fish from Drowning, Tan completely breaks the ethnic boundaries, and boldly challenges the new themes, which has a huge difference with her first four novels. As for the themes, this novel weakens the motif of seeking Chinese American identity and puts the themes of sex problems, tribulations and ecological problems into consideration. In terms of the cultural elements, the multicultural coexistence will take the place of the ethnic elements in the first four novels. Therefore, Saving Fish from Drowning deconstructs the ethnicity and has the characteristics of multiculturalism. This thesis will take Saving Fish from Drowning as the research object and adopt multiculturalism as theoretical basis. Combined with close reading, on the basis of comparative analysis of the first four novels, it will focus on how Saving Fish from Drowning deconstructs the ethnicity and explores the multicultural coexistence, and show far-reaching influence on Chinese-American literature.This thesis is divided into five parts. The introduction mainly introduces the development of Chinese American literature, Amy Tan’s life and her works, as well as the literature review and the outline. The first chapter firstly introduces the concept of ethnicity, and then discusses the ethnicity in the first four novels from two aspects:construction of the ethnic identity and implantation of the ethnic symbols. The second chapter makes a simple introduction to multiculturalism at first, and then focuses on the deconstruction of ethnicity from three important themes:sex problems, tribulation and harmony. The third chapter mainly discusses the problem of multicultural coexistence in Saving Fish from Drowning. It explores multicultural coexistence from three aspects:coexistence of different religions, coexistence of different customs and coexistence of different cultural identities. Finally, the conclusion part points out that Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning tries to get rid of ethnicity and shows the cultural diversity, which is not only a breakthrough of her writing style, but also a profound thinking on Chinese American literature. Since Chinese American literature came into being, it has been struggling to survive in the double centralism. In the age of globalization, more and more Chinese American writers look beyond the ethnicity, begin to pay attention to the problems which all human beings face, and their works increasingly present the multicultural tendency. True multiculturalism, makes the literary works more creative, and offers them a broad space for development.