Cultural Identity Seeking In The "Third Space": A Postcolonial Interpretation Of Eating Chinese Food Naked

As a Chinese American woman writer,Mei Ng is well-known for her novel,Eating Chinese food Naked,which is an outstanding work on identity seeking.Through detailed descriptions of the trivial things in Ruby's family,Mei Ng has truly reproduced the heroine's family and social relations,and has demonstrated the Chinese Americans' living predicaments and cultural identity between two cultures.In this novel,Franklin and Bell,the first generation of immigrants,and their daughter Ruby are treated as the Other,the outsider,in the white-dominated American society.Meanwhile,they misunderstand and afflict each other due to the culture and value differences.Under such circumstances,they begin to seek for a new cultural identity to get out of the dilemma.This thesis aims at exploring the process of constructing the negotiatory Third Space cultural identity between two kinds of different cultures from Edward Said's Orientalism theory,Homi K.Bhabha's mimicry,hybridity and Third Space theories.It consists of three parts,namely,introduction,body,and conclusion.Introduction gives a brief introduction to the author and the novel.And this part classifies and reviews the previous studies and academic researches on Eating Chinese Food Naked at home and abroad.At the same time,this part elaborates the theoretical framework of this thesis and illustrates the main theories which will be applied.The Body is composed of three chapters as follows:The first chapter analyzes the reason for constructing the Third Space.Franklin and Bell are deeply influenced by Chinese Feudal Principles and patriarchal culture,which has aroused a fierce conflict with their daughter,Ruby,who has accepted American mainstream culture.Both Chinese parents and their daughter's lives fall into huge crisis.They are urged to go in quest of a breakthrough.The second chapter expounds the possibility of constructing the Third Space through the strategy of Mimicry.Ruby's parents mimic the Orientalism discourse on their own initiative to cater for the American mainstream society,but they are still being treated as the Other.Ruby mimics the American mainstream discourse in the hope of integrating into the mainstream society,but she falls into a huge puzzle and crisis of cultural identity.Judging from this,Mimicry fails in constructing the Third Space.The third chapter probes into how to utilize the strategy of hybridity to construct the Third Space.It starts with the necessity of using hybridity.Then Ruby realizes the importance of Chinese culture and begins to learn and show respect to it.She reflects on the long-run blindly compromising to the white American.Furthermore,Ruby and her parents realize that both blindly mimicking the whites' identity and stubbornly sticking to the traditional identity cannot help them overcome the identity crisis caused by cultural conflicts.Only by accepting cultural hybridity and establishing Third Space between different cultures can make a person survive in the cultural conflicts.The last part draws the conclusion that marginalized Chinese American people can solve the cultural conflicts only by positively absorbing the active ingredients of other culture on the basis of Chinese culture and accepting cultural hybriditity to construct negotiatory Third Space between different cultures.