Study On The Migration Of Identity In Yan Geling’s Works

The US-based writer Yan Geling’s works raises literary concerns.As an immigrant, she’s lived in the cultural context for a long time and she has a unique exploration and thinking about the national cultural identity.Looking into her works, we found that she’s always reflecting on herself,seeking herself, confirming the subject status of herself continuously by forming the text. For one thing she learnt from the traditional culture to set up channels for cultural exchanges between East and West, and to show the charm of the culture of the motherland. For another, she’s also looking at issues on national cultural as an “outsider”, in the view of the western culture.Because of includingrichelements of Eastern culture and Western culture, legendary immigration stories, as well as multiple, complex characters, her works favored by the film and television industry, most of them were adapted for the screen, and the adapted works almost has achieved remarkable achievements. But when we compare Yan Geling’s novel and the movie adapted of the same name, We found that the original identity in novels was migrated in films.Originally strong sense of national identity in novels was rebuilt in varying degrees in the course of adapting, To achieve marketing, box-office and Western standard fit, film director partly ignored the position of national cultural identity, fell into self-Orientalism of the indigenous culture.The film’s national identity was hidden.In view of such a large difference between the identity in the two media.The migration of identity is analyzed and studied mainly from two aspect, market and director in order to discuss the deep cultural reasons included the differences.This thesis contains four sections, including the introduction, the body with two chapters and the conclusion.It mainly talks about others’ study on the adaptation of Yan’s novels, and comes up with the topic of this thesis, at the same time, defining the concept of the identity and introducing the detailed of film adaptation.It contains two sections in chapter 1,combining the text of two novels, Siao Yu and The Flowers Of War, to study the differences of this two media in identity to prove the rewriting and rebuilding to some degree in the process of the adaptation into films.It analyzes the reasons of migration of identity in the process of adaptation from market and direct. Different life experience and different cultural knowing between the West and East by the director affect identity belonging. At the same time, the restriction to the adaptation in marketing by the box-office and ROI makes films compromise to other factors and finally leads to the loss of building national identity.Studying this phenomenon, it is hoped that directors should care more about the further meaning of building national identity than profits. Only keeping our own cultural national identity, Chinese films won’t loss themselves in Globalization.