Toward Intercultural Personhood: Lin Yutang's Dynamic Construction Of Cultural Identity

Lin Yutang, with"one mind seeking the learning of ancients and moderns; two legs straddling the cultures of East and West", is reputed as"the man of wisdom in the 20th century","a cultural ambassador"and"an authentic world citizen"who embraces both Chinese and Western cultures, which makes him a very typical case of intercultural personhood. The present study aims at describing Lin's dynamic construction of cultural identity in the direction of intercultural personhood.According to Lustig and Koester's three-stage model of cultural identity development, the present researcher divides the process of Lin's cultural identity construction into three stages: unexamined cultural identity, cultural identity search and cultural identity achievement. In the first stage, Lin's cultural identity was mostly the result of the influences of his family, missionary school and the mountains in his hometown. Although he was not totally isolated from the Chinese culture, he greatly identified with the Western culture, especially Christian culture, and did not know the meaning of being a Chinese Christian. In the second stage, Lin's cultural identity was transformed several times. By using Kim's cross-cultural adaptation theory in terms of the interplay of acculturation and deculturation and the stress-adaptation-growth dynamic, the present study tries to explain the formation process of Lin's intercultural personhood on the basis of presenting Lin's social activities and relative cultural ideas. In the third stage, Lin achieved both his ethnic identity and intercultural personhood. He was characterized by two interrelated key patterns in self-other orientation: individuation and universalization. These two characteristics enabled him to transcend the dichotomy of the Eastern and Western cultures and advocate the construction of an integrative world culture by complementation.