华裔美国作家及其作品简介
A Brief Introduction to Chinese American Writers and Their Works
Contents Abstract (1)
Key words (1)
I.The Brief Introduction to the Background Information (2)
II. The Brief Introduction to the Writers and Their Works (3)
1. Maxine Hong Kingston (3)
1) Biography of the writer (3)
2) The introduction to her works (4)
2. Amy Tan (7)
1) Biography of the writer (7)
2) The introduction to her works (8)
3.Gus Lee (10)
1) Biography of the writer (10)
2) The introduction to his works (11)
4. Gish Jen (12)
1) Biography of the writer (12)
2) The introduction to her works (12)
III. The Influence of Chinese American Writers and Their Works (13)
IV. Conclusion (14)
References (15)
Abstract:Chinese-American literature refers to fictions written in English by Americans of Chinese origin. The Woman Warrior and The Joy Luck Club have made their
authors, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, popular among American
readers. The two best-sellers also hallmarked the entry of Chinese-American
literature into the American mainstream. While Chinese-American literature is
flourishing in the United States, the ―China image‖ is also changing.The
unique viewpoints and writing skills of Chinese American writers, as well as
the profound background of Chinese history and civilization, had a strong
influence on the American readers, making them feel refreshed. Among them,
Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Gus Lee, and Gish Jen are the famous ones.
And this paper will focus on those Chinese American writers and their works.
The paper will follow three steps:1) the brief introduction to the background
information; 2) the brief introduction to the writers and their works; 3) the
influence of them and their works.
Key words:Chinese American literature; Chinese American writers; works; influence, thoughts
摘要：美国华裔文学是指华裔美国人用英文写的小说。《花木兰》和《喜福会》这两部作品使其作者汤婷婷、谭恩美深受美国读者的喜爱。同时这两部畅销书也标志美国华裔文学融
入美国主流文学。而华裔文学在美国的蓬勃发展，“中国形象”也在变化。华裔美国作
家独特的观点和写作技巧以及深厚的历史文化背景对美国读者产生了强烈的影响，使他
们感到耳目一新。其中，汤婷婷、谭恩美、李健孙、任璧莲都是十分著名的作家。而本
文将侧重于这些华裔作家和他们的作品介绍。这篇论文将分以下三部分:1)背景知识简
介；2)作者及其作品简介；3)作者及其作品的影响。
关键词：美国华裔文学;华裔美国作家；作品；影响；思想
I. The Brief Introduction to the Background Information
Chinese-American literature refers to works that are written in English by Americans who are with the Chinese origin. When Chinese began to immigrate to the United States during the gold-rush age, most of them had been struggling at the bottom of the American society. When mentioned in American literature, the image of Chinese was a weak female who was always seeking for help. In the eyes of Westerners, they were al ways ―outsiders.‖ Under such situations, even America-born Chinese writers fought against their mother culture in their creations.
The situation did not change until the latter half of the 20th century in which the Civil Rights Movement took place in the United States. Many Americans began to think about people of the other races and their cultures in a different way. Besides, Feminist Movement, Anti-Vietnam War and Minority Rights, in addition to the improvement in Sino-US relation, forced the mainstream of American society to pay more attention to the Chinese image. In the 1970s, when more and more people accepted globalization, they not only accepted the Chinese-American writers whose works reflected the Chinese culture but also subjected to fighting against authority and centralization. What’s more, the unique viewpoints and writing skills of these writers, as well as the profound background of Chinese history and civilization, had a strong influence on the American readers, making them feel refreshed.
Nevertheless, Chinese-American writers are a very unique group. To the American culture, they are Chinese who followed the Chinese tradition, but in front of the Chinese civilization, they are also outsiders. Living as ―outsiders‖ of both cultures, their in terpretation of the ―China image‖ may not be as accurate as it is supposed to be. It is natural that they have to follow the American cultural trend and aesthetic taste.
Therefore, in their fictions, Chinese immigrants cannot get rid of the image of ―outsider‖ and ―the weak‖ while their knowledge about the Chinese civilization is far from enough. This is the dilemma for Chinese-American writers.
Therefore, identity-seeking has always been one of the most prominent themes in Chinese American literary writing, since Chinese Americans have been grappling with the psychological and social dilemma of the identity crises. Chinese immigrants often find themselves in an identity dilemma when they move to America. Although first-generation Chinese immigrants usually try to maintain their ethnic identity in America as Chinese, they often find it difficult to attain this goal. All kinds of racism in the American society
contribute to the breakdown of their traditional Chinese values, and they have to struggle with a new culture. Finally they see the necessity of going back to their Chinese roots and trying to achieve a connection with their original Chinese culture and a sense of racial and cultural pride if they are to know and accept who they are in the multicultural environment. Consequently, at the final stage, Chinese Americans find their new identity as Chinese Americans who embrace the multiple and often conflicting aspects of Chinese American culture—a blended culture in a shrinking world that is itself becoming more and more culturally hybrid. With this aim, many Chinese American writers use their pens to create a new form of culture. So Chinese American liberation has come into being.
II. The Brief Introduction to the Writers and Their Works
1. Maxine Hong Kingston
1) Biography of the writer
Maxine Ting Ting Hong was born on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, which had been a major supply center during the California gold-rush era of the mid-nineteenth century. A year earlier, in 1939, her mother, Ying Lan Hong, had arrived from China at Ellis Island, New York, to join her husband, Tom, who had emigrated from China to the United States fifteen years earlier. Named for a blond female gambler whom her father had met while working in a gambling establishment in California, Maxine, the first of six American-born children in the family, grew up in Stockton’s Chinatown, where her parents owned a laundry business. She never felt that her parents encouraged her to do well in her academic studies, in part because in their conservative Chinese culture, women often are not expected to have careers outside of the home. Her negative childhood experiences are reflected in The Woman Warrior, in which she exhibits a certain bitterness leveled at her parents, as well as at American and Chinese cultures.
After having excelled in her high-school studies, Hong won eleven scholarships that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley, from which she graduated in 1962. That same year, she married Earll Kingston, an actor. Two years later, she returned to Berkeley to pursue a teaching certificate, which she received in 1965. For the next two years, she taught English and mathematics in Hayward, California, and then in 1967, she, her husband, and their son, Joseph, moved to the island of Hawaii, where her great-grandfathers first had worked when they immigrated to America. In China Men,
Kingston describes the experiences of her forefathers working on the rough plantations of Hawaii, which they called Sandalwood Mountain.
In Hawaii, Kingston taught English at the state university and at Mid-Pacific Institute, a private school; in her spare time, she wrote. When The Woman Warrior was published in 1976 and became an immediate and unqualified success, she retired from teaching and devoted her energies to writing. China Men, which relates the ordeals of the male members of Kingston’s family in America, appeared in 1980, followed by Hawaii One Summer (1987), a collection of twelve prose selections. In 1989, she published Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, her first traditionally structured novel, in which she tells the fictitious story of Whitman Ah Sing, a Chinese American living in Berkeley, California, during the counter-culture 1960s, with its hippies, tie-dyed tee-shirts, and drug addiction. The energetic adventures of Whitman Ah Sing, whose name evokes images of the American poet Walt Whitman and his refrain phrase ―I sing‖—―Ah Sing‖—reveal the protagonist’s unease about his role and future in America.
Kingston is a frequent commentator and guest speaker at academic conferences and cultural events across the country, and she has often found it necessary to write articles defending The Woman Warrior, explaining herself and rebutting some critics who feel that the famous autobiography focuses too much on exotic Chinese history and not enough on the day-to-day racism that Chinese Americans face in American society. To these charges, Kingston responds that she is not trying to represent Chinese culture; she is portraying her own experiences.
2) The introduction to her works
(1)The Woman Warrior
The Woman Warrior focuses on the stories of five women—Kingston's long-dead aunt, "No-Name Woman"; a mythical female warrior, Fa Mu Lan; Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid; Kingston's aunt, Moon Orchid; and finally Kingston herself—told in five chapters. The chapters integrate Kingston's lived experience with a series of talk-stories—spoken stories that combine Chinese history, myths, and beliefs—her mother tells her.
The first chapter, "No-Name Woman," begins with one such talk-story, about an aunt Kingston never knew she had. Because this aunt had brought disgrace upon her family by having an illegitimate child, she killed herself and her baby by jumping into the family well in China. After hearing the story, which is told to her as a warning, Kingston is never allowed to mention her aunt aloud again, so she decides to create a history of her aunt in her memoir. She imagines the ways that her aunt attracted a suitor, comparing her aunt's
actions of quiet rebellion against the community to her own rebellion. Kingston also recreates her aunt's horrible experience of giving birth in a pigsty and imagines her aunt's ghost walking around with no one to give it gifts, as was Chinese custom. In the end, Kingston is unsure whether she is doing justice to her aunt's memory or just serving her own needs.
White Tigers is based on another talk-story, one about the mythical female warrior Fa Mu Lan. Fa Mu Lan, whose story is told through Kingston's first-person narrative, trains to become a warrior from the time she is seven years old, and then leads an army of men—even pretending to be a man herself—against the forces of a corrupt baron and emperor. After her battles are over, she returns to be a wife and mother. The story of Fa Mu Lan is contrasted sharply with Kingston's own life in America, in which she can barely stand up to her racist bosses. Kingston realizes, however, that her weapons are her words.
Shaman focuses on Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid, and her old life back in China. Brave Orchid was a powerful doctor, midwife, and, according to the talk-story, destroyer of ghosts back in her village. To a young Kingston, Brave Orchid's past is as astounding as it is terrifying, and many of the images from her mother's talk-story—Chinese babies left to die, slave girls being bought and sold, a woman stoned to death by her villagers—haunt Kingston's dreams for years to come. At the end of the chapter, Maxine visits her mother after being away for many years. The two arrive at some kind of understanding after many years of disagreement and conflict, and Brave Orchid is warm and affectionate towards her daughter for the first time in the memoir.
The title of At the Western Palace refers to another of Brave Orchid's talk-stories, about an emperor who had four wives. It is an analogy for her sister Moon Orchid's situation: Moon Orchid's husband, now a successful Los Angeles doctor, had left her behind in China and remarried in America. Brave Orchid urges her sister into a disastrous confrontation with the man to demand her due as his wife. As a result, Moon Orchid, who does not speak a word of English, is left to fend for herself in America. She eventually goes crazy and dies in a California state mental asylum.
The final chapter of the memoir, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," is about Kingston herself. This section focuses mainly on her childhood and teenage years, depicting her anger and frustration in trying to express herself and attempting to please an unappreciative mother. There are a number of characters whose personalities highlight many of her Kingston's own characteristics, including a silent Chinese girl whom Kingston torments as a little girl. In a pivotal moment in the chapter, Kingston, after
unsuccessfully trying to express her feelings one at a time, erupts at her mother with a torrent of complaints and criticisms. Later in her life, however, Kingston comes to appreciate her mother's talk-stories. At the end of the chapter she even tells one herself: the story of Ts'ai Yen, a warrior poetess captured by barbarians who returns to the Chinese with songs from another land. It is a fitting conclusion to a text in which Kingston combines very different worlds and cultures and creates a harmony of her own.
(2) Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
The Whitmanian presence is discernible via a character analysis of the protagonist (Wittman Ah Sing), a study of the allusive chapter titles, and an examination of the overall thematic thrust of the book. Such an investigation will reveal the remarkable cultural interaction between Walt Whitman, nineteenth century idealist-democrat-humanist, and Maxine Hong Kingston, twentieth century Asian American-modernist. A tangential benefit of this exploration will be a partial understanding of the continuing influence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass as a primary text/guide for the American democratic experiment, with special reference to the Asian American community.
The plot of Tripmaster Monkey is clearly subordinate to Wittman Ah Sing's song of himself. I quote below Tom Wilhelmus's concise plot summary: Wittman does what we suppose he would do. He cruises around San Francisco, reads Rilke aloud to passengers on a Bay Area bus, yearns after beautiful women, loses his job in a department store after conferring with the ex-Yale Younger Poet holed up in the stock room, gets stoned in Berkeley, gets married on Coit Tower by a man who may or may not be a bona fide minister, visits his parents and his "aunties" in Sacramento, makes a side trip to Reno looking for a woman who may or may not be his grandmother, and winds up fulfilling his principal ambition which is to stage a play based upon the epic Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms at a theater in Chinatown. (149) All this supposed plot exists to give Wittman Ah Sing sufficient expanse for his solitary musings, an interior monologue strongly reminiscent of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself."
The Whitmanian content of Tripmaster Monkey is evident, to begin with, in the fact that its protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing, is named after the quintessential American poet, Walt Whitman. The narrator reports of Wittman Ah Sing that "His province is America, America, his province" (41). Michelle Cliff observes: "To underline the American ness of Wittman, Hong Kingston has named him for the most American of American poets. To play with his name is irresistible. Whitman Ah Sing the body electric. Wittman, Ah hear America Singing" (11). And many other word plays are certainly possible; for example,
"Of Thee Ah Sing" and "One's-Self Ah Sing" and "Ah Hear It Was Charged Against Me."(1)
2. Amy Tan
1) Biography of the writer
Amy Tan was born on February 19, 1952 in California. She grew up surrounded by influences from both Chinese and American cultures. She has written about trying to assimilate into the mainstream, American world as a child, often at the expense of her Chinese heritage. Tan's father and brother died of brain tumors when she was fourteen years old. At this time, she also learned that her mother had been married to a different man in China and had three daughters from this marriage, a situation not unlike June's in The Joy Luck Club, her first novel.
Tan attended high school in Switzerland and went to eight different colleges, ultimately receiving a master's degree in Linguistics from San Jose State University. Tan became a published author at the age of eight when she wrote an essay on the public library that was published in a local paper. Before The Joy Luck Club (for which she won the L.A. Book Award and The National Book Award) was published in 1989, Tan had a wide variety of jobs, everything from a bartender to a counselor for developmentally disabled children. She now lives in San Francisco with her husband Lou DeMattei, whom she married in 1975.
Amy Tan is part of a movement of Asian-American writers that includes Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior) and Wakako Yamauchi (Songs My Mother Taught Me). A large part of Tan's contribution to the modern Asian-American literary boom is her widespread popularity. The Joy Luck Club, aside from winning numerous awards, was a fixture on the best seller list and was made into a feature film, for which Tan helped to write the screen play. Tan's popularity helped expose an entire genre of literature to a broad cross section of society.
Tan's writing relies heavily on flashbacks, storytelling, and mysticism. In The Joy Luck Club, Tan starts each chapter with a short parable that is in some way a parallel with the woman whose story is being told in the chapter. This connection of the past and the present is typical of Tan's style.
Tan has said that her intention in writing is not to provide historical information, but rather to create a work of art. Her work is generally received in this manner. Critics have said that her works are not necessarily "Chinese" in nature, but are instead stories with universal themes (generational conflicts, war of the sexes, etc.) that have an added
dimension of being told through narrators that are constantly searching for a balance between their Chinese heritage and American lifestyles.
2) The introduction to her works
(1)The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club contains sixteen interwoven stories about conflicts between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. The book hinges on Jing-mei’s trip to China to meet her half-sisters, twins Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa. The half-sisters remained behind in China because Jing-mei’s mother, Suyuan, was forced to leave them on the roadside during her desperate flight from Japan’s invasion of Kweilin during World War II. Jing-mei was born to a different father years later, in America. Suyuan intended to return to China for her other daughters, but failed to find them before her death.
Jing-mei has taken her mother’s place playing mahjong in a weekly gathering her mother had organized in China and revived in San Francisco: the Joy Luck Club. The club’s other members—Lindo, Ying-ying, and An-mei—are three of her mother’s oldest friends and fellow immigrants. They tell Jing-mei that just before Suyuan died, she had finally succeeded in locating the address of her lost daughters. The three women repeatedly urge Jing-mei to travel to China and tell her sisters about their mother’s life. But Jing-mei wonders whether she is capable of telling her mother’s story, and the three older women fear that Jing-mei’s doubts may be justified. They fear that their own daughters, like Jing-mei, may not know or appreciate the stories of their mothers’ lives.
The novel is composed of four sections, each of which contains four separate narratives. In the first four stories of the book, the mothers, speaking in turn, recall with astonishing clarity their relationships with their own mothers, and they worry that their daughters’ recollections of them will never possess the same intensity. In the second section, these daughters—Waverly, Jing-mei, Lena, and Rose—relate their recollections of their childhood relationships with their mothers; the great lucidity and force with which they tell their stories proves their mothers’ fears at least partiall y unfounded. In the third group of stories, the four daughters narrate their adult dilemmas—troubles in marriage and with their careers. Although they believe that their mothers’ antiquated ideas do not pertain to their own very American lifestyles, their search for solutions inevitably brings them back to their relationships with the older generation. In the final group of stories, the mothers struggle to offer solutions and support to their daughters, in the process learning more about themselves. Lindo recognizes through her daughter Waverly that she has been irrevocably changed by American culture. Ying-ying realizes that Lena has unwittingly
followed her passive example in her marriage to Harold Livotny. An-mei realizes that Rose has not completely understood the lessons she intended to teach her about faith and hope.
Although Jing-mei fears that she cannot adequately portray her mother’s life, Suyuan’s story permeates the novel via Jing-mei’s voice: she speaks for Suyuan in the first and fourth sections, the two ―mothers’ sections,‖ of the novel. Suyuan’s story is representative of the struggle to maintain the mother-daughter bond across cultural and generational gaps; by telling this story as her mother’s daughter, Jing-mei enacts and cements the very b ond that is the subject of Suyuan’s story. When Jing-mei finally travels to China and helps her half-sisters to know a mother they cannot remember, she forges two other mother-daughter bonds as well. Her journey represents reconciliation between Suyuan’s t wo lives, between two cultures, and between mother and daughter. This enables Jing-mei to bring closure and resolution to her mother’s story, but also to her own. In addition, the journey brings hope to the other members of the Joy Luck Club that they too can reconcile the oppositions in their lives between past and present, between cultures, and between generations.
(2)The Bonesetter's Daughter
In memories that rise like wisps of ghosts, LuLing Young searches for the name of her mother, the daughter of the Famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain. Trying to hold on to the evaporating past, she begins to write all that she can remember of her life as a girl in China. Meanwhile, her daughter Ruth, a ghostwriter for authors of self-help books, is losing the ability to speak up for herself in front of the man she lives with and his two teenage daughters. None of her professional sound bites and pat homilies works for her personal life; she knows only how to translate what others want to say.
Ruth starts suspecting that something is terribly wrong with her mother. As a child, Ruth had been constantly subjected to her mother's disturbing notions about curses and ghosts, and to her repeated threats to kill herself, and was even forced by her mother to try to communicate with ghosts. But now LuLing seems less argumentative, even happy, far from her usual disagreeable and dissatisfied self.
While tending to her ailing mother, Ruth discovers the pages LuLing wrote in Chinese, the story of her tumultuous and star-crossed life, and is transported to a backwoods village known as Immortal Heart. There she learns of secrets passed along by a mute nursemaid, Precious Auntie; of a cave where dragon bones are mined, some of which may prove to be the teeth of Peking Man; of the crumbling ravine known as the End
of the World, where Precious Auntie's scattered bones lie, and of the curse that LuLing believes she released through betrayal.
Like layers of sediment being removed, each page reveals secrets of a larger mystery: What became of Peking Man? What was the name of the Bonesetter's Daughter? And who was Precious Auntie, whose suicide changed the path of LuLing's life? Within LuLing's calligraphic pages awaits the truth about a mother's heart, what she cannot tell her daughter yet hopes she will never forget.
Set in contemporary San Francisco and in a Chinese village where Peking Man is being unearthed, The Bonesetter's Daughter is an excavation of the human spirit: the past, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes. The story conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of myths, and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory what we have lost in grief. Over the course of one fog-shrouded year, between one season of falling stars and the next, mother and daughter find what they share in their bones through heredity, history, and inexpressible qualities of love.
3.Gus Lee
1) Biography of the writer
Augustus Samuel Mein-Sun Lee was born August 8, 1946 in San Francisco, the first son and youngest of five children of Tsung-Chi Lee and Da-Tsien Tsu. The novel China Boy (1991) is a thinly disguised narration of his childhood, first as the adoring and adored son of his real mother, and after she died of breast cancer, as the seven-year-old outcast of both the streets and his stepmother's tightly run household. Fulfilling his father's dream, Gus Lee went to West Point (as "Kai's" story continues in Honor and Duty, 1994), but left after three years because he could not master the academy's standards for mathematics and engineering. He went on to get his B.A. and L.L.B. degrees from the University of California at Davis, and while there served as the assistant dean of students for the Educational Opportunity Program as well as project coordinator of the Asian American Studies program. Upon receiving his law degree in 1976, he entered the Army and served as a prosecutor and judge advocate. He was never sent to Vietnam, as his superiors were reluctant to put an Asian soldier in a command position, but went to Korea to investigate those recruits who were foreign nationals. This experience was the basis for the novel Tiger's Tail (1996). Upon leaving the Army, he returned to California to practice as an attorney and legal educator.
Lee had never considered writing anything other than legal briefs until his then seven-year-old daughter Jena asked him about her Chinese grandmother. While collecting
memories and family history from his four sisters and other family members, Lee started writing a family journal, but his wife Diane declared that he had the basis for a book. He described the three month writing process as "going down whitewater rapids. The other books took much more navigation and thought." (Publishers Weekly, 1996). Reluctant to publish the journal because of the unflattering descriptions of some of his family, and knowing how it would hurt his father (his stepmother having died in 1975), he changed the names and sold it as fiction.
The tremendous success of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan two years earlier created a wonderful opportunity for Asian-American writers. As Lee says, she "opened the floodgates for the rest of us," combining "the tremendous excitement of learning about a new culture" with "universal feelings and experiences -- love, honor, and betrayal and family bonds." (Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, 1996).
Gus Lee, his wife and their two daughters now live in Colorado Springs, having moved there from the Bay Area when Lee decided to pursue writing as a full-time career. His newest novel, tentatively titled "Methods of Death," is forthcoming.
2) The introduction to his works
(1)China Boy
Kai Ting is the only American-born son of an aristocratic Mandarin family that fled China during World War Two to escape invasion and civil war. Growing up in a San Francisco ghetto, Kai is caught between two worlds embarrassing neither a Chinese nor an American way of life. After his mother’s death, Kai is suddenly plunged onto the violent streets of his American neighborhood by his new stepmother, a Philadelphia society woman who is determined to erase every vestige of China from the household, even by physical force. This is the story of Kai Ting, torn violently between two worlds, but accepted in neither, and his ultimate fight for the peace in between as he discovers an enemy, a friend, and a set of mentors who have experienced far greater hazards than his own.
(2)Tiger's Tail
The protagonist of Tiger's Tail is Jackson Kan, a Chinese-American who grew up in San Francisco's predominantly black Panhandle, went to West Point, obtained a law degree and fought in Vietnam. In 1974, Kan is sent to Korea as a Judge Advocate General Corps (JAGC) lawyer to investigate Army corruption--in particular, the nefarious activities of one Colonel LeBlanc, a renegade commander with his own private agenda for fighting the Red Hordes.