Self, nations, and the diaspora: Re-reading Lin Yutang, Bai Xianyong, and Frank Chin

Consisting of the case studies of three contemporary Chinese American writers, Lin Yutang (1895-1976), Bai Xianyong (1937-), and Frank Chin (1940-), my dissertation focuses on their self-definitions, their responses to Chinese and American cultural traditions, and particularly their cross-cultural perspectives. By juxtaposing the three writers, I take a revisionist view to the currently available paradigms of Asian studies and Asian American studies. While traditionally, these two fields tend to be mutually exclusive because of certain narrow-minded definitions of cultural tradition or ethnicity, my dissertation argues that an interdisciplinary perspective can better explain the complex interplay of culture and politics in the context of the East-West encounter.; In the introduction, I frame the empirical study of these three writers in relation to the evolving transnational perspective in Asian American studies and its related postcolonial and postmodern theories. I respond to the lack of attention to the Chinese diaspora in Asian American studies while at the same time taking into account of the historical specificity of the Asian American minority discourse.; In the body of my dissertation, I take the three writers beyond the boundary of one nation and a single cultural tradition. In Chapter One, I analyze a specific form of East-West encounter in the semi-colonial environment of Shanghai in the 1930s. Lin Yutang's perceptions of cultural crossing and national identity were shaped by this specific context and were later carried over to the United States. In Chapter Two, I present Chinese modernism as a form of bi-cultural practice and emphasize that Bai Xianyong's modernist consciousness of exile is directly informed by his experience as an immigrant writer in the United States. In Chapter Three, I challenge Frank Chin's selective adaptation of Chinese cultural legends and classical literature and his anachronistic formulation of Asian American cultural historiography. Although with regard to Asia and Asian culture Chin's attitude shifts from blanket dismissal to romantic acceptance, his creative works betray certain ambivalence in terms of their representations of the Chinese diaspora.; I conclude by calling attention to the heterogeneous and transnational literary past of Asian Americans. Acknowledging this heterogeneity requires that we study racial and cultural hybridization with historical specificity.