Construction And Deconstruction Of Orientalism In Shanghai Girls

These years,a growing number of works about China have attracted attention from American readers.Lisa See's Shanghai Girls is one of such novels.A lot of former studies about the book have been conducted from feminism and new historicism.This thesis tries to study the novel from a new angle---the perspective of Said's post-colonial theory,Orientalism.It intends to reveal how and why Orientalism is reflected in the novel.It is composed of an introduction,the main body and a conclusion.The introduction briefly introduces Said's Orientalism and its background.And also it introduces Lisa See and her life experience,and then it categorizes the main researches on the book and introduces the framework of the thesis.It also analyzes the reason why Chinese-American literature is centered on China and Chinese culture.The second part is the main body,which includes three chapters.Chapter one explores how Orientalism is constructed by studying the details and plots in the novel and digs out the profound social and historical reasons behind it.It consists of three sections.The first section analyzes Orientalism on the aspect of settings,which are bustling Old Shanghai and Chinatown.Both of them are typically characterized as orient,frequently appearing in the literature of Chinese-American writers.Lisa See illustrates the fate of the two sisters taking the two cities as the background of their stories.But in this novel she creates an Old Shanghai which includes all ugly and backward phenomena of China,and describes Chinatown as a place which is a mixture of good and evil,full of philistine people.In this way,she satisfies western readers' curiosity and their superiority of Orientalism.The second section mainly talks about the plots featured by typical but one-sided Chinese characteristics which also take on the look of Orientalism.Lisa See narrates foot-binding,arranged marriage,fatalism and Chinese zodiac.She exaggerates the elements of divine spirits in Chinese culture in order to gain readers' attention which reveals her commercial intention and Oriental consciousness deeply-rooted in her mind.The third section centers on the characters who are weakened men.It conveys the stereotype of China in Chinese-American literature.Males who are weak,fragile and flabby contrast sharply with tough,tenacious and strong females.With the deliberate contrast,stereotyped impression of Chinese men and women is gradually formed in the mind of western readers,which warps the inherent nature of Chinese people and misleads western readers to a misunderstanding of Chinese culture.Chapter Two manifests how Orientalism is deconstructed in the novel.The deconstruction of Orientalism is well illustrated by the depiction of the tough,tenacious and strong females.The stereotyped Chinese females follow the Three Obedience and Four Virtue.When a girl,obey her father;when a wife,obey her husband;when a widow,obey her son.As Westerners' imagination,Chinese women who are fragile and lack of power of discourse are victims of feudal society.But in the novel,Lisa See depicts the sisters and their mom in a totally different way.When in difficulty,all the females behave courageously and fearlessly which breaks up the stereotypes of Chinese women.Two reasons account for the deconstruction.First,it's hard for Chinese Americans to cast off the Chinese heritage which is deeply rooted in their blood.They are influenced by Chinese culture all through their lives.Second,after World War II East and West begin to communicate more often which gives a chance for Chinese to speak on the stage of world.In this way stereotyped thinking to China and Chinese is partly broken up,which explains why the author can deconstruct Orientalism to some extent.Based on such seemingly paradox between construction and deconstruction,Chapter Three discusses the integration and assimilation between Chinese and American cultures under the circumstances that female Chinese Americans are oppressed by both patriarchal ethics and racial discrimination.The Chin sisters try their best to blend with American society.They Americanize their clothes,food,and even belief.In other words,the two cultures are blended together in them.Conclusion summarizes the previous exploration which mainly focuses on the construction and deconstruction of Orientalism in this novel and points out the contribution to the communication between Western and Chinese cultures made by the author who has dual cultural statuses.