A Study Of "Self" And "Other" In Descendants Of The Eunuch Admiral

Kuo Pao Kun is one of the most famous Singaporean playwrights. He is a bilingual playwright with Chinese origin and western educational background. His life experiences indicate a cultural hybridity in him which could be sensed obviously in the play under study in the paper. The play Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral is very obscure with its fragmentation in form and content. It is mainly written in English, but there are Chinese, Malay, Tamil and Indian language mixed with English in the play. And the author uses English mainly skillfully to delineate and discuss the ancient Chinese cultural phenomenon as the eunuch. Such characteristics in the author and the play are worth studying. And the academic studies in and out of China on the author and his plays are in the initiation stage, which means that there is much space for related researches.The concepts of "self" and "other" are always in the binary opposition, and "self" is the centered and preferred one. In post structuralism, the binary opposition between self and other is being continuously criticized and dissolved, and "other" finally gets the upper place. In Lacan’s mirror stage theory, the infant first knows itself as wholeness through its image in the mirror. The image is outside of it, and it is actually other for it. It would identify with that outside image and use it to form the image of itself. Lacan thinks that the similar process of identification happens during one’s whole life. This situation means that "self" is constructed by other. Lacan also thinks that after the mirror stage, when people begin to study language, they begin to be regulated and controlled by the capitalized Other in the symbolic realm represented as various linguistic structures and social relationships.According to the above theoretical basis, the thesis studies the image of self and other represented respectively in the play Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral. The image of self in the play is represented through the image of the unreliable narrator and the image of other is represented through the image of Zheng He. The unreliable without a clear identity in the play finally identifies with Zheng He as other. He regains his cultural identity as a hybrid identity that cures the narrator’s aphasia in the text and enables the narrator to become a descendant of the eunuch admiral. The linguistic and cultural heterotopias created in the play as the outcome of the negotiation with the capitalized Other environmentally permits the forming of such a hybridity.The hybridity of the narrator and Zheng He symbolizes the hybridity of self and other. So the thesis concludes that the play explores new possibilities to dissolve the binary opposition between self and other. The new possibilities can be realized through the hybridity between self and other in the linguistic and cultural heterotopias as the outcome of the negotiation with the capitalized Other.