Representing Chineseness: the problem of ethnicity and sexuality in Chinese American female literature

Abstract

The potential confrontation of Oriental and Occidental values represents

one of the most important topics of scholarship since the twentieth century.

Within this debate, American-born Chinese female writers occupy a unique

position in their preoccupation with the two seemingly irreconcilable cultures.

On the one hand, their Western upbringings entices the distortion of China from

an Orientalistic perspective, on the other hand, they find their desire to come to

terms with their ethnic cultural heritage to be equally difficult to supplant. It is a

dilemma which sparked conflicts even within the Chinese American community,

and begs the redefinition of the Chinese American female identity.

It is thus, by applying Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical notions about

Self/Other relations to the writings of Chinese American female writers, I

consider how subjectivity is not substantive but a situated experience of selfhood

in movement, and argue that Chinese American female writers may still be

internalizing and perpetuating oriental stereotypes in their works, when they too

have started re-orienting and hence, re-orientalising China and their Chinese

identity. The United States of America is to Chinese American women as

alienated at times as China. Under the framework, I further consider the futility

of disputing the dual identity of Chinese American female writers to the extent

to which identity can be considered as an ambivalent and ambiguous notion that

has a temporal element in it.

As a writer writes first and foremost about his or her own singular

experiences in relation to the world, this thesis tackles the above question by

examining how elements of anguish, solitude, and death, as noted by Beauvoir,

and that are often present in Chinese American female writers’ accounts of their

singular experiences, connect them to others. Through the evocation of such

elements to establish the connection between Self and Other, which constitutes

the authenticity of self-expression as opposed to suppression of self-assertion,

one’s struggle with separation and one’s own truth is represented. In this sense, it

is not, the ultimate result or triumph of an individual’s struggle with unity or

individuality that matters; but rather, the process of self-struggle that

corresponds to the dignified human existence within Beauvoir’s philosophical

framework.

The three elements of situation anguish, death and solitude are dealt with in

this project in the following context: in Chapter Two, Ann Mah’s anguish over

Chinese and American food is examined in connotation to the relations of herself

with others around her that coerces her to reflect upon her ethnic and cultural

affiliations. In Chapter Three, death is explored through the discussion of the

footbinding notion in which the death of the foot signifies the end of docile

acceptance as well as the beginning of transformations. Solitude is elucidated in

Chapter Four through Maxine Hong Kingston’s warrior woman

conceptualization that adopts and later re-orientalises silence. In all three

situations, I pay attention to the way re-orientalisation is achieved in the Chinese

American female project of selfhood in movement towards the Other.