Constructing Ethnic History And Self-Identity

Fae Myenne Ng(1956--)is an outstanding Chinese American writer.Her works Bone and Steer Toward Rock have been well received since their publication.Her works have won the American Book Award and been nominated for the Faulkner Award,and she also has received the Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts.She is good at blending personal experience with fiction,so her works not only have high literary value,but also show the traumatic history of Chinese Americans in the early days.Bone is a typical example.The novel depicts a family of three daughters living in San Francisco's Chinatown It tells a series of contradictions and disputes between the family before and after the suicide of their second daughter,Ona,from the perspective of the eldest sister,Leila.The novel is full of binary oppositions:life and death,parents and children,west and east,love and hate Scholars at home and abroad have analyzed the book from different perspectives such as identity,narrative structure,and male imagesThe Third Space in the post-colonial context refers to a kind of vocal space beyond the binary opposition,which is used to explore the previously repressed,fragmented or neglected scenes and develop them again to expand the possibility of struggle or resistance Based on the Third Space theory brought up by the famous postcolonial theorist Homi K Bhabha,this thesis attempts to analyze the process of the heroine of the novel Leila's identity pursuit associated with the construction of the ethnic history,and how she manages to build her own space between the American society and Chinatown and at the same time reveal the ethnic history of trauma,and how she is able to find her identity during the process of revealing history;therefore,this thesis demonstrates that the process of the character's pursuit of cultural identity is not only a search for self-identity,but also a construction of ethnic historyIn addition,unlike previous studies that focused only on the narrator or the father in terms of cultural identity,this thesis will discuss both the first-and second-generation Chinese Americans in the novel and highlight the character's anxiety caused by being trapped in different identities.In the era of globalization,Bone can bring us a lot of thinking It is also hoped that this thesis can arouse readers' further understanding of minorities'identity issue and history.