China As Imagination In American Chinese Narratives

A century and a half has passed since the beginning of Chinese American writing. During this lengthy period, Chinese immigrants, both laborers and intellectuals, went through some extraordinary personal and collective experiences in the American society. For most, their American life was marked by the endless effort of searching for individual identity and cultural belonging. As the descendants of a "superior culture", they felt China and Chinese culture provided them with spiritual guidance as they lived in a strange country. At the same time however, belonging to that culture left them feeling inferior and rejected in a society that was endemically racist and saturated with discrimination. This contradiction was demonstrated in their writings and made the narratives more complicated then ever. The sense of pride and the sense of humiliation, the sense of self-glorification and self-pity, recognition and rejection all became co-existent elements of their storytelling. Their narratives that were based on memory, folklore and family sagas were part of their efforts to preserve and raise their own voice and dignity beneath the oppressive presence of mainstream culture. In addition, their stories were a response to adopting a new perspective on and approach to China while accelerating cultural assimilation. Hence China and the Chinese culture became a text that was subject to being translated, deconstructed, and reconstructed in their writing, and thus it never appeared more unsettled and unstable. In their narratives, we not only observe an old story being inherited and incorporated into a new form of writing, but also being intentionally stressed, distorted, and alienated from its "original". If we view this literary phenomenon against the background of China's modernization after the late-Qing dynasty, it will become clear that all the descriptions of China -- about immigrants' homes, their country lives, their anxiety and their identity crises were not a strange phenomenon. If we agree with what Benedict Anderson said that nation/country is an "imagined community", then we will also agree that the narratives based on memory, legend, and family sagas are an "imagined imagination". The study of such "imagined imagination" then becomes a series of individual literary cases against the background of East and West cultural exchanges.In the following thesis, I examine Chinese immigrants' writing in America over the last one hundred fifty years, and explore the different ways that various authors adopted and adapted to an "imagined" China. I will demonstrate that the concept of China is merely an ever changing discourse embedded in different texts at different times and merits further enrichment.