The Relationship Between Memory And Identity Reconstruction In Fae Myenne Ng’s Steer Toward Rock

As an up-rising star in the Chinese American literary field,Fae Myenne Ng composed influential works that concerning the living conditions of Chinese American people in the twentieth century.As her classic masterpiece,Steer Toward Rock came out in 2008 and before long it won the American Book Award.The novel depicts Jack,a second-generation Chinese American immigrant in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1960s,who experiences the displacement and confirmation of his identity during the Chinese Confessions Program and finally becomes a legal American citizen.Cultural memory theory posed by Jan Assmann focuses on the construction of identities with cultural metaphors,and the thesis explores the identity construction of the main characters in the novel by employing cultural memory theory,thus to reveal the difficult living conditions of Chinese immigrants who are pursing the American dream at that period.The thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter mainly introduces the writer Fae Myenne Ng and her work Steer Toward Rock,and it also contains a literature review about the related researches in this field and briefly introduces the cultural memory theory.Chapter two,three and four are the principal parts that analyze the work from three perspectives respectively,which are cultural metaphor,the relationship between individual and cultural memory,cultural memory and identity construction.The second chapter starts from the concrete cultural metaphor and focuses on the metaphorical forms of cultural memory.It mainly analyzes the novel from the perspective of collective memory and individual memory,employing cultural memory theory to explore the different influences caused by different cultural memory on the characters.The third chapter explores the novel from two dimensions of time and space,analyzing the relationship between individual and cultural memories in details.The first part of this chapter discusses the different cultural memories of three generations of immigrants from the perspective of time.The second part analyzes Jack’s individual memory from the perspective of space.Through the characters and plots of the novel,this chapter praises the admirable essence of traditional Chinese culture and its embodiment in the life of Chinese people overseas,and it shows themes of love,harmony,tolerance and the search for roots in the whole novel.The fourth chapter begins with cultural memory as well as identity construction,and it focuses on the process of identity loss and reconstruction of the four typical characters in the novel,which are Jack,Joice,Ilin and Veda.The fifth chapter is the conclusion,which summarizes the necessity of using cultural memory theory to analyze Steer Toward Rock and discusses the significance of this thesis,and it also draws some important conclusions.Different cultural memories have different influences on people.On the one hand,positive cultural memories can cause a positive impact on people and help people rebuild their identity.On the other hand,negative cultural memories have a negative effect on people and even make people lose themselves.