Identity Pursuit Through Traumatic Narration

The Chinese American New Immigrant writer Qiu Xiaolong sets his “DetectiveSeries” on China around the1990s, concerning trauma suffered by the citizens duringthe dramatic social changes and its impact. The thesis focuses on three characters inthe “Detective Series”. Through a detailed review of the trauma narration as well asthe narrative technique in these novels, the traumatic influence on the identity of thecharacters will be analyzed. The purpose of this thesis is to work out how immigrantwriters represented by Qiu Xiaolong manages to construct their identities, which aredifferent from the previous Chinese American writers, through featuring charactersand writing about trauma.The thesis falls into three parts: the introduction, the main body and theconclusion. The main body of the thesis contains three chapters. The introductionbriefly introduces Qiu Xiaolong’s life experience, awards, representative books, aswell as previous researches done on his works, and the theoretical frameworks of thethesis. Chapter one to chapter three offer a detailed analysis of the three characters inthe “Detective Series” respectively—Wen Liping’s traumatic experience leads to heridentity crisis, indicating the interaction between trauma and identity loss; Jia Ming,who turns into a perpetrator from a victim of trauma, suffers from identity destructionunder the effect of trauma; the hero Chen Chao manages to recover from his traumathrough writing and investigating cases, offering a tentative approach of the identityconstruction for Chinese American writers.