Transpacific utopias: the making of new Chinese American immigrant literature, 1945-2010

This dissertation looks at theories of hope and utopia in the works of transnational and first-generation Chinese American authors from 1945-2010. By beginning after the Maoist Revolution and the Second Sino-Japanese War, this project follows the development of the transnational and first-generation new immigrant through the works of Lin Yutang, Li-Young Lee, Nieh Hualing, Ha Jin, and Wang Ping. In addressing these authors the dissertation considers how they have sought to leave behind the social and political conditions prevailing in China then, to journey across the Pacific and thence to imagine and author worlds different from their original sources. How do writers fictionalize migration and land-orientation to signal the emergence of a new hope, one less nation-based and instead invested in a global identity? These texts engage histories of Chinese Communism, American capitalism, and American democracy, and their re-imagined representations of these issues arguably have helped shape the new transnational immigrant sensibility in U.S. literary studies. The dissertation examines the resilience of hope as a re-generative affect in the social imaginary drawn in these texts when dreams of financial success, political freedom and upward social mobility fall short. As failure is dramatized and thematized, hope as a motivating idea becomes more and more situated in the immaterial world, and this alternative productively complicates the theories of utopia and hope that I review in this thesis. Studying immigrant attempts to achieve a utopia "of one's own" puts pressure on the US as a presumed utopian site and re-frames the conventional image of the country as a promised land. While the dissertation focuses on a select Chinese American canon as a signifier for a national shift in global identity, this focus, I argue, enables a larger investigation into and sustained discourse on the representations of hope in contemporary and ethnic U.S. writing.