The Construction Of Orientalism In Waiting

Waiting is the second full-length novel in Ha Jin’s writing career. This novel won the National Book Award in1999, which brought a great fame to Ha Jin. As one of American minorities, Ha Jin just uses English to create his works, which help him not only capture the hearts of mainstream readers and critics’attention, but also lead to the comments from Chinese academics.Through the analysis of the text, the thesis tries to show the construction of Orientalism in Waiting, which can apparently reveal the purpose of Ha Jin’s Oriental writing, catering to the Occident’s fancy of the stereotype of the Orient. Ha’s writing corresponds to the habitual thought of Orient and is a representation of Orientalism. The thesis consists of six chapters.The first chapter mainly states Ha Jin’s life story, Ha Jin’s position in American Literature and a summary of the novel Waiting, the current studies at home and abroad. Chapter two briefly introduces Edward W-Said at first. Then a detailed introduction to the theory of Orientalism, it is mainly from the following three aspects:theoretical origins, the content&illustration of Orientalism and the present study of Orientalism. The second part of this chapter is the manifestation of Orientalism in Chinese American literature, two aspects of which are emboied:one is the emasculation of the male "Other", the other is the peddling, derogating and distorting of Chinese culture.Chapter three talks about "the Oriental construction of "Other"(Lin Kong) in Ha Jin’s Waiting, which has three images of the Oriental Other:the feminized Other, the marginalized Other, and the emasculated Other. The Oriental construction of Other sets up the unequal relationship of gender and right, race and power between the Occident and the Orient. Chapter four presents the Oriental construction of Chinese women’s image in mainstream culture. With the virtue of depicting the narration of bound feet under Chinese American writers and the Oriental narrating of Shuyu’s bound feet in Waiting, Ha Jin panders to the Orientalists’imagination of the exotic being in the Orient and satisfies the expectation to the stereotype of the traditional Chinese female so that he could win a recognition from the western world. Chapter five reveals Ha Jin’ Oriental construction of China in Waiting from two views, the socialist China under the communist system and the traditional China under the system of western knowledge, which manifest the prejudice of ideology of the Orient (socialist China) under the context of the Occident.The last chapter summaries the whole analysis, indicating that Ha Jin’s success is not an occasional occurrence in western academic world. We should not only recognize Ha Jin’s active intervention in mainstream society as a scholar who zealously reveals the darkness side of society, but also can not ignore his negative action of slandering Chinese culture intentionally as a Chinese American diaspora writer. In a word, for these kinds of works, we should discard the dross and select the essence.