A New Chinese American Feminine Image With The Dream Of Integrating Chinese And American Cultures

Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston has attracted the widest attention in the contemporary American literary circle. The publication of her maiden work The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts has been a great hit and been regarded as a pioneering work for vitalizing the Chinese American literature. It has been translated into more than twenty languages and discussed not only as a literary work but also as a cultural text for research on America itself, anthropology, history, ethnic identity and women, etc. In the eyes of many American scholars and readers, Kingston has become the representative of Chinese American literature.In the field of literary study, most of the researchers home and abroad have conducted their research at all levels from different perspectives such as seeking cultural and ethnic identity, cultural conflict, feminism, post colonialism, postmodernism and breaking layers of silence, etc, but no one analyzed this work from the perspective of intertextuality and collage. Drawing on the theory of postmodernism, taking the stories of an ancient poetess Ts'ai Yen and a woman hero Fa Mulan, this thesis takes a new path in elaborating on its postmodernist features from the perspective of intertextuality and collage.Kingston borrows, adapts and transplants the Chinese folk legends creatively so as to present readers with a picture of integration of the Eastern and Western cultures. There are six evident collages in The Woman Warrior: at the beginning of the Chapter Two "White Tigers", Kingston adds the mysterious color of martial arts novels and kung fu movies, hybridizes the legend of Hua Mulan who took the place of her elderly father to fight in the battlefield, collages the stories of Yue Fei's mother tattooing his back and of Yue's Army adding masculine power to her woman warrior, inserts Song of the Parting Son by Tang Dynasty poet Meng Jiao and expresses her feminist ideas based on the then social environment. This is a story of a woman hero Fa Mulan by mixing Kingston's memory, myths and reality.Through the above mentioned analysis, the thesis comes to a conclusion that Kingston, by means of intertextuality and collage, creatively adapts Chinese folk stories, rewrites quintessential Chinese culture, reshapes the new image of contemporary Chinese American women, and expresses her hope and desire for publicizing Chinese culture and accomplishing final coexistence in perfect harmony between Chinese and American cultures.