Cultural Assimilation And Dislocation In Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet

History of Chinese immigration to England has been long but literary representation of the subject is contemporary. Centering round the lives of the Chinese immigrants in England, Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet (1982) presents an ironical version of cross-cultural experience. By analyzing the characterization, story space, authoring language and language as a factor to assess assimilation, this paper explores the negative process of assimilation and dislocated position of the Chinese immigrants in London. The characterization in Sour Sweet is done against the backdrop of the immigrant history in the 1960s. The text and the history interweave while the hostility and discrimination from the host society render the subject reason for the dislocation of the immigrants. At the same time, the identity as Chinese immigrant contributes to the objective reason of dislocation for the immigrants are struggling between the identity of Chinese and immigrant. The Chinese immigrants are unique in the way that they have built many Chinatowns across the world. Chinatown serves a community for the immigrants and it bears the imagination of home. In search of a sense of belonging, the immigrants also form sub-communities, which also impede and exclude the immigrants from making contact with the host society. Language functions as a connection both to the parent culture and the host culture, and the attitude toward language also reflects the immigrants'attitude towards assimilation. For Timothy Mo, language also functions as a strategy to write back to the empire. He uses appropriation by using Chinese Pidgin English to make the two cultures interact with each other. The ironical presentation of the characters, their attitude toward the parent and host culture as well as the two languages satirizes and criticizes both Chinese culture and Orientalist stereotype. Revolving round the trajectory of the family's immigrant life in London but with a selective use of omniscience, the narrator reveals the different attitudes within the family towards their identity as Chinese immigrants in London. Placing the characters within a polarity between assimilation and dislocation, the book depicts cross-cultural experience of the immigrants as negative, both culturally and psychologically.