The Identities Of Chinese Americans In The Third Space: A Postcolonial Interpretation Of Mrs. Spring Fragrance

Sui Sin Far(born Edith Maude Eaton) is regarded as the first Chinese female writer in North America. Published in 1912, her representative work— Mrs. Spring Fragrance embodies Sui Sin Far’s appeal to the fact of unfair treatment of Chinese Northern Americans and eagerness for integration between the East and the West. The characterization of Chinese, touched by her sympathetic drawing, is concrete and authentic in this work, not only subverting the stereotypes in the mainstream discourse but also profoundly reflecting Chinese immigrants’ endeavor of identity construction.Approaching from the perspective of postcolonialism, this thesis attempts to analyze identities of Chinese Americans in the work Mrs. Spring Fragrance with the guidance of important concepts by Homi Bhabha, namely, “Third Space”, hybrid, mimicry and ambivalence. According to the viewpoint of Homi Bhabha, the immigrants live in the “in-between” world and their identities are continuously redefined. The Chinese Americans in Mrs. Spring Fragrance are in the same situation. Strong Western culture affects these Chinese Americans deeply so that the intersection of Oriental culture and Western culture leads to the intense collision between them. Under such influence of hybridization of cultures, Chinese Americans transcend the dual-oppositional relationship in the culturally overlapped Third Space and build hybrid identities.The thesis is made up of six chapters. The first chapter is the introductions to research background, Sui Sin Far and her work Mrs. Spring Fragrance, its literature review, the significance of this research, research methods and the layout of this thesis. The second chapter is the illustration of postcolonial theory, including the identity construction and Homi Bhabha’s key theoretical ideas, such as, the Third Space, mimicry, ambivalence, hybridity, etc. The next three chapters are the main body of the thesis. The third chapter, by analyzing Chinese immigrants’ language imitation and adaptation of Western lifestyle, explores how these Chinese Americans use the strategy of mimicry to resist the mainstream of white culture, refusing to be fully assimilated. The fourth chapter illuminates the Chinese immigrants’ ambivalent relationship with the white people who occupy the dominant position in the society, as the Chinese Americans are attracted by the highly developed modern American civilization on the one hand while they always feel themselves discriminated and oppressed by the mainstream society on the other hand. The fifth chapter focuses on the hybridity of Chinese Americans’ identities by discussing the two major hybridized phenomena of mixed races and hybrid cultures between the Chinese and the Westerners. The sixth chapter is the conclusion of the whole paper, noting that Chinese Americans take the journey of complicated identity negotiation in the Third Space where everything is fluid and split and during the communicative and deliberating process these Chinese immigrants who settle down in the foreign land construct their hybrid identities in the Third Space where two different cultures overlap each other.