Author name:
نادية حكمت فارس
Supervisor name:
ايمان فتحي يحيى
Abstract:
It has been noticed by scholars that some ethnic novelists explicate the feeling of diaspora and reveal their characters’ juggling between two different cultures, one represents their roots, and the other represents the culture of their residence. This thesis attempts to bring to the forefront the quest of identity as presented in the narratives of the Chinese American writer, Amy Tan. The tension in Tan’s dual heritage finds its way into her novels. She draws parallels between two different societies, the western, and the eastern. This study analyzes identity development of two protagonists in each novel; a mother and her daughter going through a long path of discovering the self within multiple spaces, China and America. The American born protagonist (the daughter) represents the West. She feels that the culture of her own ethnicity is inferior to the dominant one, that is, the American culture. Accordingly, she goes through an identity crisis. On the other hand, the Chinese born protagonist (the mother) finds herself exotic in a society where her daughter is raised with different language, ideologies, and moral codes. The study answers questions about identity, ethnicity, belonging, multiculturalism, and gender issues that have a great influence on the construction of the identity. It focuses on women’s journey to wholeness after an eventful life replicating the Chinese immigrant experience in microcosm. Special attention is paid to this immigration and the beginning of Chinese American literature which is part of the Asian American literature. The study falls into three chapters and a conclusion.Chapter One is the introduction which falls into two sections, the first section presents a historical sketch of Chinese immigration to the United States. Several questions are raised and discussed, like : how those immigrants were treated? Were they regarded as Americans? When was the Chinese immigrants starting point to write about their experience? The focus on this historical period aims to take into consideration the roots of Chinese American literature and the impact of this immigration on the first and the second generation in the novels of this study who find themselves in a constant search for their cultural identity. This section presents theories of identity, with a focus on Chinese American identity synthesis. These theories are explored through the characters’ relationship with their culture, or to be specific, one’s adopted culture highlighting the heterogeneity of identity in a community as well as traumas of change as a result of outside pressure. The second section is a biographical sketch of Amy Tan. This section highlights the close relationship between Tan’s own life and her writings by mentioning real incidents in Tan’s life and their reflection on her literary work. The reason behind choosing to analyze the novels, The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Bonesetter’s Daughter in particular is that these two texts complete each other. Although both of them examine how the past haunts the present preventing the mother and the daughter from having solid cultural identities for themselves, one of them focuses on the mother and the other on the daughter. This almost equality of roles helps this study approach the problems of identity once from American eyes then from Chinese ones.Chapter Two deals with The Kitchen God’s Wife, 1991.The emphasis is on Weili who suffers from gender role in China. When she immigrates to USA, she tries to interweave her identity with the Americans’ way of life. The clash with her Americanized daughter, Pearl, is concentrated and linked with the clash of cultures, the American vs. the Chinese. Eventually, this tension ends by a talk story narration’, a Chinese tradition of narrating stories mixed with folklore. Weili tells her daughter the story of how she defeats an abusive husband, patriarchy, and the tragedy of WWII. This journey in the hidden sea of memories makes the daughter look at her Chinese identity from a different angle, Pearl begins to respect her mother’s suffering and understands her strange behavior, Pearl also realizes that she cannot deny who she is; a hybrid person who respects her heritage and lives her Americanness. The journey ends by establishing new identities that unite the wisdom of the east and the modernity of the west.Chapter Three deals with The Bonesetter’s Daughter, 2001. It traces the journey of becoming, starting with the life of Ruth, the daughter who rejects her mixed blood and adopts the American culture over her Chinese one. Her confused identity widens the gap between her and her mother, LuLing, who, in turn, feels isolated and displaced from the American world. The family secrets, which are written in a form of diary, are used to convey truth and identity loss through the characters of this novel. These secrets help Ruth find her past and accept her roots. The Chinese identity plays a significant role as a cultural healing to the protagonists. By the end, they realize that it is impossible to have a pure cultural identity but instead they can live in the third space’ as a Chinese American.The study ends with a conclusion where the findings of the study are summed up.
