A Postcolonial Study On The Cultural Identity Reconstruction And Relocation In Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book is the first real novel written by the Chinese-American female writer Maxine Hong Kingston in 1989.Unlike her previous works,Tripmaster Monkey transfers the focus from the reconstruction of Chinese American history to that of Chinese American cultural identity.Previous studies are done mainly from such perspectives as writing techniques,feminism,and cultural identity crisis,which are not enough to shed light on belongingness and relocation of Chinese Americans.In Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,the protagonist Wittman Ah Sing is a native fifth-generation Chinese American,who is stereotyped and marginalized by the American mainstream society due to his hybrid cultural identity.Kingston spares no efforts to subvert the stereotypes and discrimination and remodel a new cultural identity for Chinese Americans by shaping the image of Wittman Ah Sing.This process embodies the strategy of Hybridity and the Third Space theory of Homi K.Bhabha,which is seldom studied by scholars up till now.By analyzing the protagonist,from his perplexity of cultural identity at the beginning to his self-identity reconstruction and identification and then to his relocation and transcendence,this thesis tries to reconstruct and relocate the cultural identity of Chinese Americans.Based on Homi K.Bhabha’s theory of Hybridity and the Third Space,breaking the binary oppositions of West versus East,Self versus Other and Man versus Woman,this thesis thinks that Ah Sing’s experiences reconstruct a hybrid,interstitial and coexisting space,thus providing a new way out for cultural identity reconstruction and relocation.Through in-depth analysis of the text,with Tripmaster Monkey as the research object,exploring the cultural identity reconstruction and cultural relocation as its main task,the author of this thesis believes that the cultural identity of Chinese Americans is the interaction of Chinese culture and American culture,which is hybrid and multicultural and also points out that under the multicultural background in America,“the Third Space” is the only place that Chinese Americans can locate their cultural identity with their hybridized cultural background,in which the binary opposition can be transcended,the two cultures can coexist and finally they can reach harmony through communication,hybridization and negotiation rather than alienation,discrimination,exclusion of different races and cultures.Only in this way can Chinese Americans regain confidence and belongingness.This is a way out for Wittman Ah Sing as well as for other Chinese Americans and meanwhile it can provide a reference for other ethnic minorities when they are confronted with perplexity of hybrid identity under the background of globalization.At the same time,it is of great significance for the harmonious coexistence of different cultures.