Abstract:
My dissertation investigates how Chinese American writers invent transnational Chinese American identities in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, I focus on Amy Tan's The JoyLuck Club (1989), Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (1996), and Shawn Hsu Wong's American Knees(1995). 1 argue that Tan, Lim, and Wong challenge the conventional ideas of a singular, pure, and fixed identity but instead create Chinese American identities in the post-1965 era as multiple, hybrid, and constantly changing to accommodate to an open, diverse, and multicultural America. Specifically, in Tan's work, by describing both the conflicts and connections between the Chinese mothers and their American horn daughters, she represents a group of Chinese American women who transcend their cultural, generational, and linguistic differences to achieve an identity that connects the West with the East. In Lim's work, by portraying the domestic and international movements of herself as an immigrant, she reveals the long and painful process of negotiating multiple cultures and identities that enables her to change from a Chinese Malaysian to a new Asian American woman. In Wong's work, by focusing on how the fourth- and fifthgeneration of Chinese and/or Asian American men and women negotiate racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, Wong meditates on what the term Asian American means in the new age. Together the three works reflect the range, diversity, and invention of contemporary Chinese American identities by Chinese American writers in the new era.