An Interpretation Of Bone From The Perspective Of Cultural Criticism

The Chinese American writer Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone has drawn the attention of scholars both at home and abroad since it was published in 1993,and has won many book awards in the United States.Domestic scholars also began to study this novel in the new century.The novel tells the story of an immigrant family,namely Leon’s family,living in Chinatown in San Francisco.At the same time,it also unfolds the different experiences and bitterness of three generations of Chinese Americans for readers to have a deeper understanding of the Chinese Americans.This paper interprets Bone from the perspective of cultural criticism.Cultural criticism focuses on the underprivileged in a pair of binary relation.The Chinese Americans,especially the early Chinese labourers were discriminated and excluded by the American mainstream society,and were also ranked as the lower class of the society,which is in accord with cultural criticism’s research area.The paper first introduces the meaning,significance and development of cultural criticism,and then introduces the research achievements of Bone home and abroad.The main body of the paper is divided into four parts,adopting four key concepts of cultural criticism,that is,cultural memory,multiculturalism,acculturation and identity to analyze the experiences and choices of the main characters in Bone,the cultural phenomena embodied in the novel and then explain the reasons and influential factors that cause these cultural phenomena such as the situation of domestic problems and foreign invasion in China in the middle and late 19 th century,the social background of the United States in urgent need of work force,the economic crisis in the United States,social trends exemplified by the multiculturalism.Finally,through the above analyses,the influences of these cultural phenomena on Chinese Americans are summarized and some suggestions are given to the contemporary Chinese Americans who are still trapped in these cultural phenomena or self-contradiction,such as finding their own cultural memory,developing their own dual cultural attributes,keeping the balance between American mainstream society and Chinese community in order to respond to culture shock positively and seeking for their own third space between Chinese and American identity.