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. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:HKU/oai:hub.hku.hk:10722/174495 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Ng, Yor-ling, Carly., 吳若寧. |
| Publisher | The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) |
| Source Sets | Hong Kong University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PG_Thesis |
| Source | http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B47753158 |
| Rights | The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works., Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License |
| Relation | HKU Theses Online (HKUTO) |
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