Relocating Chinese Heritage--A Postcolonial Reading Of The Kitchen God's Wife

Since the success of her first novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), Amy Tan has been regarded as another literary star from the Chinese immigrant community in the United States, like her predecessor Maxine Hong Kingston. The Amy Tan phenomenon has become so hot a topic for discussion in the United States that many readers are fascinated by her second novel The Kitchen God's Wife (1991). Though her second novel is sometimes considered less marketable than her first one, it deals with the issue of the relocation of Chinese heritage in a more conspicuous and profound manner. The present thesis is a tentative attempt at deciphering Amy Tan's theme of relocation of her Chinese heritage in The Kitchen God's Wife, an issue that few scholars have examined before. The novel clearly shows that the author, who is in some way rebellious against the American Orientalist discourse, reclaims and revises and finally relocates her Chinese heritage. The study of this issue may offer a new perspective to the American experience of Amy Tan and other Chinese American writers.The thesis is a postcolonial study of The Kitchen God's Wife with the focus on Tan's relocation of her Chinese heritage. It includes five chapters. Chapter 1 is a brief overview of the Amy Tan phenomenon, and sets up a framework, in which two postcolonial notions, Homi Bhabha's "Third Space" and Robert Young's "doubleness of hybridity", will be adopted in the analysis of the novel. Chapter 2 discusses the cultural dislocation among Chinese diasporas in the United States and therefore indicates the necessity to relocate their Chinese heritage. Both Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are devoted to the discussion of how Amy Tan relocates her Chinese heritage. In more detail, Chapter 3 deals with the author's contestation against the dominant discourse, and how it leads to her reclaiming of Chinese heritage. Chapter 4 explores how Tan revises her Chinese heritage with the aim of exemplifying its new version. Chapter 5 concludes that through the reclaiming and the active revision of her Chinese heritage, Amy Tan rids herself of the dislocation of her cultural identity, and comes to terms with the duality of her cultural heritage. In this sense, she completes her relocation of her Chinese heritage.