Identity And Hybridity:A Study Of Phoenix Eyes From The Postcolonial Perspective

Russell Leong is an outstanding Asian-American writer, who has published a collection of short stories Phoenix Eyes and poems The Country of Dreams and Dust respectively. Influenced by his own life experience, his writings reveal objectively the lives of contemporary marginalized Asian Americans.This thesis attempts to analyze Phoenix Eyes from diaspora theory and Homi Bhabha’s Hybridity theory. And through a close reading of Russell Leong’s Phoenix Eyes, this thesis divides the characters into different groups according to the similarities they share, and through analysis of the identity confusion of the representative characters, this thesis aims to analyze the different “marginalized” Asian Americans’ identity pursuits in Phoenix Eyes. Then it intends to find the possible way out for Asian Americans to better get adapted to the American society.This thesis argues that, in Phoenix Eyes, these different groups of characters unexceptionally experience miseries and sorrows and they live in struggles and pains. Through the description of these characters’ life experiences and living conditions in America, Russell Leong successfully proves that no matter how hard these characters try to settle down in America or to go back to their homelands or to create in their imagination a common imagined community, their efforts are all in vain at last and they fail to become a part of the mainstream American, fail to go with the mainstream society, fail to go back to their homelands and fail to live in the imagined community. In fact, they have been forced into the diaspora groups. No matter how different lives they lead, they have one thing in common, that is, they are all marginalized people. In order to survive under the background of multiculturalism, the best way out for the protagonists is to stop resisting the dominant American culture and to start accepting and cherishing identity hybridity with more tolerance and openness.