Chinese-American Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the nature of modern literature written by Chinese-American authors. It analyzes common themes and trends in this literature style. Works examined include Eric Liu's "The Accidental Asian" and Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior". It also looks at Lisa See's "On Gold Mountain" and Amy Tan's novel "The Joy Luck Club". The paper discusses issues such as the language style used in these novels and common themes.

From the Paper:

"A substantial body of Chinese American writing emerged in the 1970s and the flow of novels, stories, poems, family histories and memoirs has grown steadily ever since. Although there is great variety among these (mostly) second-generation writers the predominant focus of their work has been on questions that have evolved around the phenomenon of being Asian in America. The majority of these writers have forgotten most of their Chinese, never having learned it much beyond their pre-school years, and they write about the difficulty of balancing on the biracial, bicultural cusp between the old-world ways of their parents and their own lives as speakers of American English functioning in a culture that was, and often remains, entirely foreign to their parents. As these American-born Chinese (ABCs) attempt to assess their own place in a nation where they constitute a very small percentage of a population that is sometimes hostile toward them they are also, like most immigrants' children, compelled to wonder about the culture from which they came. The dilemma of their own "Chineseness" is the question underlying all the works discussed here. But there are nearly as many ways of approaching the question as there are writers. The present discussion of various kinds of literary production by a number of contemporary Chinese-American writers will, therefore, concentrate on why writers chose particular forms, how these approaches facilitate the questions they want to ask, and what answers they have found to the essential question of what it means to be "Chinese" in America."

More papers on Chinese-American Literature:

• Book Review # 30317 : "Maxine Kingston's Literature"
• Analytical Essay # 63893 : "The Asian-American Immigrant"
• Essay # 86020 : "The Inaccuracy of Multiculturalism in Children's Literature"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: