History, Memory And Pain: Decoding Fae Myenne Ng’s Fictions From The Perspective Of Trauma Theory

Fae Myenne Ng has become one of the new outstanding Chinese Americannovelists after the noted writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. In1993,she published her first work Bone and achieved immediate responses. This excellentwork got highly praised by the critics in literary field and the readers in public. In2008, she published her second work Steer toward Rock.The suffering and trauma imposed by the Chinese Exclusion Act and racism inthe psyche of the Chinese-American is one of the motifs in Modern AmericanLiterature. Ng’s trauma writing not only consists of the themes and characters, butalso integrates the rhythm, process and uncertainty of trauma with the ideas andstructures of her novels. The trauma categories include faith and identity confusion, aswell as the inquiries of social power utterance and introspection on alienation. Thetraumatic objects are concerned with both individuals and collectives. In Ng’s works,trauma is like a prism which reflects the living predicament and essence of theChinese-American and even all humans from various angles.This dissertation aims to form the trend of Ng’s trauma writing with the analysisof her two well-known novels, Bone and Steer toward Rock. Ng directly demonstratedthe psychological trauma of protagonists, and then presented the nation’s trauma. Shewas concerned with the Chinese-American culture and history through elaborating thelife of Chinese Immigrant in America. Thinking of the future of theChinese-American, Ng tried to offer an adoptable way out of the identity crisis forrecovery. It reveals that the only way for the marginalized people to reconstruct theiridentity is to confront, revisit and reshape their traumatic past and memories.This paper will be divided into four chapters. The first chapter is concerned withthe introduction of Fae Myenne Ng and her two novels. The second chapter isconcerned with the current situation of relevant studies both at home and abroad; thenintroduces the theory of trauma. The third chapter will make use of the personal experiences of Leon and Jack, the heroes of the two books, so as to demonstrate thestruggle of many Chinese Americans. By making a study of Bone and Steer towardRock, the fourth chapter will focus on the history of Chinese Americans reflected inliterature and the trauma recalled in Chinese Americans’ memories.