A Spatial Study Of Lue Gim Gong's Identity In Wooden Fish Songs

Ruthanne Lum McCunn is a Chinese American writer in the 1980 s.Although she is not as well known as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan of the same period,Ruthanne's writing has its own unique characteristics.She is committed to writing the true legendary stories of Chinese immigrants,depicting their diligence,courage,wisdom,and arduous pioneering process.She writes to establish a monument for their immortal life and makes their contributions to American history and society seen by American people.She writes their stories that have disappeared in America's official history to win the voice of justice for them.Ruthanne's novel Wooden Fish Songs is based on the true story of Lue Gim Gong,a Chinese horticulture genius and vividly reproduces his journey across America and China.The life story of Lue Gim Gong spans the continents of China and America and the two parts of the America in his lifetime.Different spatial experiences and cultural collisions make him fall into the predicament of identity acknowledgement.In the novel,the life story of Lue Gim Gong is narrated by three women from different geographical spaces with different cultural backgrounds.The hero Lue Gim Gong never issues his own voice from the beginning to the end.This intentional silence of the writer implies Lue's confusion in his identification.This thesis will make a spatial study on McCunn's book Wooden Fish Songs.Through concrete analysis of manifestations of the three forms of space in the text,this thesis aims to explore the hero Lue Gim Gong's identity crisis.This thesis is made up of three parts,namely an introduction,a three-chapter main body and a conclusion.The introductory part makes a brief introduction about the research background and a general introduction to Ruthanne Lum McCunn and her novel Wooden Fish Songs as well as the significance of this research.It also includes the domestic and overseas situation of Ruthanne Lum McCun and this novel,a brief introduction on spatial criticism and the research of identity problems.As the main body of the thesis,Chapter one,Chapter two,and Chapter three,based on spatial criticism and the close reading of the text,interpret the novel from the angles of geographical space,social space and the third space to find Lue Gim Gong's identity predicament and crisis as well as his pursuit of a new identity.The last part is a conclusion of the whole thesis.Through the analysis of three different spaces constructed in the novel,the thesis points out that space construction is an important way to reflect the identity problem of the character.In Wooden Fish Songs,Ruthanne Lum McCunn presents Lue Gim Gong's identity anxiety and predicament in different spaces.At the same time,she expresses her concern about the living conditions of marginal people in different cultures and and expresses her expectations of the society's awareness and consideration of the problem.