An Interpretation Of The Family Image In Bone From The Postcolonialist Perspective

In a more favorable social environment, Chinese American literature has made great progress in the last three decades and has become one of the most important parts in the American literary field. In 1993, Chinese American writer Fae Myenne Ng published her first novel Bone and achieved an immediate success. This novel got highly praised by the critics and the readers. Fae Myenne Ng has become one of the new excellent Chinese American writers after the famous Chinese American writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan.Bone describes a tragedy of a Chinese immigrant family life in Chinatown. The tragedy of this family is also a national history of the Chinese American in America over the past century and a half. The previous studies pay much attention to the image"bone"and neglect the important image"family". It can gain a deeper understanding of the novel by interpreting this image in the postcolonialist theory.This thesis can be divided into five Chapters. The first chapter is the introduction which includes the biographical information of Fae Myenne Ng, the plot of Bone, and literature reviews of this novel. The body consists of three chapters. The second chapter is the theoretical foundation: first introduces the basic theories of postcolonialism, then a brief analysis of the traditional definition of family, a history of Chinese American immigrant and the theme of family in the Chinese American literature. The third chapter discusses the changes of family on both geographical and psychological levels. On the geographical level,"family"means different places for the three generations: China; Chinatown; outside of Chinatown. On the psychological level, Professor Wang Lingchi classifies Chinese American into five categories. This theoretical framework can be used to analyze the Leongs'psychological changes. The fourth chapter is the discussion of the reasons of the family migration. In the historical and social conditions, the Chinese American suffer from the racial discrimination, and there are many conflicts and contradictions between the two different cultures and the two generations of Chinese Americans. So the three generations have different choices of"family". The last chapter, conclusion, summarizes the thesis and draws a conclusion. Through a detailed interpretation of the"family"image in Bone from postcolonialist perspective, the thesis comes to a conclusion that Ng has contributed greatly to the family issues, which contains deeper cultural and historical implications.