Research On The Identity Construction Of Mengli, A Thailand’s Chinese Female Writer

As the female intellectual has developed and grown on overseas in the Chinese literature field, the team of Chinese female writers and their literary achievement are more and more conspicuous. Chinese Literary World in Southeast Asian ushered in prosperous period of female writing in the late 1970s and 80s. Although the domestic academic circle has paid increasingly attention on the research on the overseas Chinese female literature, but there is a serious deficiency on Chinese feminine literature of Southeast Asian in recent years. The quantity and quality of the female writers and their literary works have significantly improved in Thailand’s Chinese literary world. Nevertheless, there is scarcely any research to their overall and only a little bit of case studies so far. Mengli appeared in Thailand’s Chinese Literary World in the early 1980s and has been listed at the top of research on the Thailand’s Chinese female writers by the domestic academic circle. The domestic academic circle mainly discusses thought content, cultural connotation or artistic features of Mengli’s prose writing. This thesis discusses that how literary characteristics, culture experience and gender consciousness work on her identity construction, combining cultural studies with the feminist literary criticism as well as scrutinizing relevant texts, by researching Mengli and her prose writing. I hope it can promote some references and lessons for the development of the overseas Chinese female literature and Chinese contemporary female literature. It is divided into four chapters:The first chapter discusses the relationship between the literary characteristics of Mengli’s prose and her identity construction. Mengli chooses prose writing. Her prose writes mainly memory and emotion. Its artistic features inherit the simple beauty and form of expression of Chinese classical prose, as well as the Chinese classical painting skills and strategy of gender replacement strategy in Chinese opera. Moreover, Mengli’s prose is Chinese writing. These literature characteristics contain that how Mengli constructs her identity of literature and female.The second chapter analyses how Mengli constructs her cultural identity, based on her cultural experience both of China and Thailand. She has accumulated cultural experience in geographic space both of the two countries. Mengli forms the dual cultural identity under the influence of their cultures.The third chapter discusses the effect of Mengli’s gender awareness on her identity construction. She had suffered from such survival plight about distorted female identity and lack of women’s rights in patriarchy society. She constructs female’s gender identity from the true sense, after receiving the identity from the outside world and herself by establishing her own business and amateur literary creation, on the premise of female self-consciousness awakening.The fourth chapter is a review that what the practical significance the research on Mengli’s identity construction has for the overseas Chinese female literature and Chinese contemporary female literature. Her prose writing has personal limitations but makes a breakthrough at the later stage, which prompts the overseas Chinese female writers who should jump out of the closed space of private writing, develop a broader subject and improve ideological penetration, standing in the context of globalization. Mengli’s prose writing makes her construct intact self-identity in double confirm both of the outside world and herself, by setting up female social group consciousness and harmonious relations between men and women. Chinese modern and contemporary feminine literature should learn these writing strategies from Mengli, to break those limitations and difficulties because of the body writing.