On the Identity Construction in Fifth Chinese Daughter.doc

1 Chapter One Introduction Chinese American literature works are increasingly popular in recent decades. Chinese American writers have increased since the Chinese Exclusion Act was finally abolished in1943. From then on, Chinese American literature attracted more and more attention from the American society and gradually became an important part in American multi-cultural literature. In Chinese American literature, a lotof Chinese American women writers like the author of Fifth Chinese Daughter Jade Snow Wong have made their insightful voices heard through their works. Jade Snow Wong has been praised as“ the mother of Chinese American literature ”by Maxine Hong Kingston because the work Fifth Chinese Daughter has inspired Maxine Hong Kingston in her later writing. [7] Fifth Chinese Daughter , written in1945 and published in1950 when Jade Snow Wong was at the age of28 years old, has e a classical work in the history of Asian American literature. The book has been translated into several Asian languages and was used as“ the best example of Chinese American literature ” in the literature classes in American middle schools. [7] In China, the study of Chinese American literature has made great progress, especially the works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, while the study of Jade Snow Wong and her work Fifth Chinese Daughter was scanty. Those studies fall into three categories. The first category is about the theme of the novel, such as He Yinli ’s paper “A Thematic Study Of Jade Snow Wong ’s Fifth Chinese Daughter ”(2013). The second category focuses on the analysis of the cultural differences between China and the United States including diet-culture in this novel, like Wang Zhenying ’s essay “ On the cultural differences between China and the United States in Fifth Chinese Daughter ”(2012) . The third category concentrates on parison with other works. As for the identity issue, there are no many papers or essays about it. Generally speaking, we need pay more atten