The Chinese Americans' Identity In Lisa See's On Gold Mountain

On Gold Mountain is the Chinese American writer Lisa See's first work.In this family biography,she depicts the struggle of the See family among five generations and over 130 years,presenting the Chinese Americans' history in a real,vivid and detailed way.It also lays a solid foundation and provides material for her later historical novels.The critics mainly focus on Lisa See's historical novels and pay less attention to On Gold Mountain.The previous studies on this biography are concerned with the Chinese Americans' history,but few studies pay attention to the issue of Chinese Americans' identity.Identity studies have been the hot topic in the diaspora literary criticism,especially under the social context of globalization.Accordingly,this thesis intends to analyze the identity changes of the See family from generation to generation,and explores the writer's identity puzzle revealed in the biography through narrative analysis.Through the analysis,it can be found that from the racial era to the ethnic era,Chinese Americans are always under the control of the white cultural hegemony,and the Sees' identity changes show that Chinese Americans won't acquire the harmonious identity under the binary opposition of Chinese culture and American culture.Through emphasizing the cosmopolitan values—love and family in the biography,Lisa See tries to seek for the sameness among human beings and build a happy family for all the ethnicities,thus revealing her identity tendency towards the “citizen of the world”.The analysis of the identity in On Gold Mountain not only helps to understand the characters' identity of Lisa See's later historical novels,but also sheds light on the identity problem-solving of Chinese Americans and even all the diaspora groups to some degree.