Confronting The Painful Dilemma:A Female British Chinese's Root-Seeking Journey And Identity Reconstruction In Loop Of Jade

Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother,Sarah Howe moved to England as a child.She is a Chinese-British poet,academic and editor.Her first book,Loop of Jade,won the T.S.Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award;it was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.Loop of Jade explores Howe's dual English and Chinese heritage through telling the poet's root-seeking journeys to Hong Kong.Her poetry spans distances of culture,language,custom,and interpersonal chasms.With astounding exquisiteness,cross-cultural consciousness and extraordinary skills,her poetry daringly probs into gender and injustice,environmental problems through place and identity.By means of ecofeminism,postcolonism and theories of linguistic philosophy,this paper purports to uncover how Sarah Howe,as a mix-blood migrant woman faced with identity crisis of multiculturalism and gender oppression in an intersystemic world of culture and ecology,explores the integration and reconstruction of her multiple identities by means of feminine writing,identification,and arts to radically reflect on patriarchal ideology which is based on dualism and derive all the unequal structures of oppression.The first chapter aims to uncover the manifestations and causes of Howe' s identity crisis through problems of identity representation and loss of the Chinese cultural root.Distrust of language's signifiance and phallocentric discourse undermine the effectiveness of identity representation.Collisions of two different cultural and ethnic systems produce identity confusions and anxieties.Traumas like her diasporic experience and the fact that her mother was abandoned as a child in China together with childhood “memory,fantasy and desire” prompt her to embark on the journey of seeking back her missing parts.The second chapter deals with the process of identification in Loop of Jade,and explores how the identification with human and nonhuman influence the identity cognition and identity reconstruction of the poet.Howe' s identification with/against her mother reflects the source of her original identity and self-independence,and her later identification with Chinese compatriots helps resurrect her Chineseness and obtain a sense of belonging.Her final identification and distancing with the nonhuman nature further redefine human-nonhuman relationship,expand her female self,and facilitate her to discover the connection between exploitation of nature and subjugation of women,and find out the hidden causes of her identity incompleteness in the patriarchal society.The third chapter relates to the strategies the poet carries out to reclaim Chineseinheritance and reconstruct her multiple identities.Through retrospecting Chinese history and her personal life experience,criticizing Chinese culture,and merging western and eastern culture,the poet succeeds in integrating her multiple cultural and ethnic identities.By means of feminine writing against phallocentric discourse,and realizing fluidity between language,arts and the world to broaden the possibilities of language and representation,Sarah Howe finishes her reconstruction of gender identity.