Identification In Mona In The Promised Land From The Perspective Of Post-Modernism

Gish Jen is one of contemporary Chinese American writers. As the second generation of Chinese American writers, she has a rather higher visibility. Her works consist of three novels: Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land and The Love Wife, and some short stories, such as Who is Irish? Mona in the Promised Land is Jen’s second book, which depicts a story about choosing and growing on a second generation of Chinese American girl, Mona Chang, when facing the confusion of identity.This thesis intends to analyze the identity issue of figures in this fiction from the perspective of postmodernism. Mona in the Promised Land, the representative work of Gish Jen, inherits the classical topic-identity issue, in Chinese American literature on one hand, on the other hand, subverts the traditional comprehension to racial and cultural identity, which means that identity is fixed, single and unchangeable, while transfuses a renewed conception of multicultural and hybrid identity in accordance with their own desires and experiences. Mona, the protagonist, was born and grew up in the white society; accepted education in American school, influenced by Chinese culture in a Chinese family while choosing to believe in Judaism finally. In addition,she thought that the identity was fluid and could be changed according to experiences.This conception is a renewed, multicultural and hybrid cognition to identity which is different from anterior literature works. This kind of identity concept in this novel shows a strong color and characteristic of postmodernism: indeterminacy,hybridization and multiculturalism and Mona’s confusion, searching and integration matches indeterminacy, hybridization and multiculturalism respectively, which is generally meaningful to some other immigrant’s novels.The thesis is designed to expound the construction procedure and cause of Mona’s identity in Mona in the Promised Land and to analyze the characteristics of her identity from the perspective of postmodernism, in order to prove that Mona’s the procedure of identity construction represents the characteristic of postmodernism.