From "Other" To "Hybrid"-A Study Of Chinese American Females In The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is the masterpiece of the famous Chinese American writer Amy Tan. Once published, the novel gained a lot of attention among the readers. It remained to be on the bestseller list of New York Times for as long as 9 months.The novel focus on the complex relationship between the first-generation immigrant mothers and their Americanized daughters and embodies the cognitive process of their identity under patriarchy and imperialism, from which emerges a new image of Chinese American females. In this way, the Chinese culture and American culture go through a transformation from confrontation to harmonious co-existence. This thesis studies the identity issues of the females in The Joy Luck Club from post colonialism. Said proposed that Orientalism is an "Oriental myth" arising from the western prejudice and curiosity over the Third World. The so-called "Orient" is to vindicate the superiority of the west. Hence, the west put forward the concept of Oriental as "other" in relation to "self". Under such circumstances, the Chinese Americans become other in the white society. The ABC daughters make an attempt to integrate into the dominant society but are ruthlessly rejected as the displaced Other, making them confused about their identity. The reality dilemma forces them to re-examine the relationship between Chinese culture and their identity. Homi Bhabha broke the dialectical relations between subject/object, self/other by proposing concepts including split and ambivalence. Bhabha believed that identity is not a simple identification but rather alienation. A hybrid identity means that, in terms of discourse, the colonizer and the colonized are in an interwoven and interdependent state. The mothers reconstruct their identity through two silence-breaking attempts and the daughters, from the mothers’recollection of the past, start to envisage the Chinese culture and find a hybrid identity in two cultures.By virtue of two important theories in post colonialism, this thesis makes a detailed analysis of the loss of identity of Chinese American females in western culture and become other. In their reconstruction of a hybrid identity, the Chinese American mothers and daughters gradually eliminate the dichotomy between "other’and "self" and break the ethnic and cultural boundary.In a globalized context, such transformation from confrontation between Chinese culture and western culture to a state of negotiation and harmonious coexistence offers possibility and guidance for the development and peaceful co-existence of multi-cultures.