A Comparative Study Of The Cultural Identity Between Amy Tan And Gish Jen

In the last decades, Chinese American literature has made unprecedented progress. There emerges a new generation of creative and influential Chinese American writers, whose works receive much acclaim from the readership. For example, Amy Tan, whose first novel The Joy Luck Club was enthusiastically received by critics and the public, is generally acknowledged as another living legend after Kingston. Gish Jen, another representative figure of these new generation writers, published her debut novel Typical American in 1991, which is widely believed to have gone beyond the dilemma of cultural identity. With the development of multiculturalism, Amy Tan, Gish Jen and other new generation Chinese American writers are inspired and influenced by the current of multiculturalism spreading out in the United States. Although all the new generation Chinese American writers are affected by the trend of multiculturalism, the ways they demonstrate this trend in their works are not always the same. This is rather obvious when if we make a comparison between Amy Tan and Gish Jen. In the sense of representing culture, Amy Tan can be thought as a connecting link between the preceding and the following in this new trend. Gish Jen, on the other hand, goes beyond the Chinese American literature tradition and marches directly into a multicultural realm. This thesis intends to make comparison between Amy Tan‘s The Joy Luck Club and Gish Jen’s Typical American in order to find out the differences between two woman writers in contemporary time.The thesis is divided into six chapters:The first chapter is the introduction of the background, purpose and significance of the study, Amy Tan and Gish Jen and their representative works.The second chapter is literature review, stating the definition of cultural identity, reviewing the studies of domestic and overseas cultural identity, Chinese American cultural identity and cultural identity in the two writers‘ works.The third chapter is the theoretical foundation. Said‘s Orientalism and Homi Bhabah‘s hybridity will be introduced in this chapter, which are to be used to analyze the confliction between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club and to explain the cultural identity of the Changs in Typical American in Chapter Four.The fourth chapter investigates the process of recognition of cultural identity in The Joy luck Club and Typical American. In The Joy luck Club, due to the difference of Eastern and Western cultures, the different understanding of family and individual leads to the confliction and rejection between the mothers and daughters. However, with the maturity and growth of the daughters, they accept their ancestral culture gradually and reconstruct their cultural identity. The protagonists in Typical American change from typical Chinese to typical American, which signifies that ethnic background will not become a barrier of minorities‘ development in America. And Gish Jen emphasizes the hybridity of Chinese American cultural identity in the work.The fifth chapter compares the cultural identity in the two works from three aspects: the author‘s creative gist, the content of the works and the cultural elements in the works, concluding that from Amy Tan to Gish Jen, it is a process of transcending from identification to disidentification.The last chapter is conclusion. Along with the transformation of American society from cultural assimilation to multiculturalism, Chinese American literature shows diversification in its styles and themes. The hybrid identity of Chinese Americans becomes popular. So to speak, both Chinese Americans and Chinese American literature will finally cast away their marginal images and in a sense enter the mainstream in the multicultural American society.