A Road To Cultural Integration: A Study Of Mona In The Promised Land From The Perspective Of Multiculturalism

Gish Jen is an outstanding Chinese American woman writer. In her novel Mona in the Promised Land, she shows her interest in Multiculturalism, a hot topic no matter in political field or academic circle. This thesis chooses Multiculturalism as its theoretical basis, and has a study of the phenomenon of cultural conflicts and cultural integration in Mona in the Promised Land by using the methods of textual study, induction and comparison as its methodology. This thesis aims to discuss the feasibility of Multiculturalism and broaden the space of the study on Gish Jen and her works in a multi-cultural society in the context of globalization today.Multiculturalism, as a theory of cultural studies, emphasizes the impact upon and interaction among different cultures and stresses the salad-bowl-like “cultural integration” to solve cultural conflicts. The novel Mona in the Promised Land is devoted to a brief account to Mona’s growth experience with her Chinese-American family members and friends from different cultures. So it is rational and feasible to have s study on cultural integration in Mona in the Promised Land from the perspective of Multiculturalism. This thesis tries to study the progress of multicultural integration in Mona in the Promised Land.This thesis consists four chapters. The first chapter introduces the writer Gish Jen and the novel Mona in the Promised Land, the theory of Multiculturalism, and the thesis statement. The second chapter explores the cultural conflicts among different cultures in the novel, including the conflicts between traditional culture and American modern culture, between Chinese culture and Jewish culture, and the conflicts among other cultures of the ethnic minorities. The third chapter deals with the cultural integrations among different cultures in the novel by analyzing the examples of the successful cultural integration and the unsuccessful cultural integration and analyzes the difficulties in the progress of cultural integration. The last chapter, as a conclusion, presents the findings of the study, the significance of the findings as well as the limitations and suggestions of the thesis.