Cultural Conflicts And Negotiation In The Love Wife From The Perspective Of Cultural Identity

Gish Jen,a contemporary Chinese American writer,was born in New York and is a representative of the New generation of Chinese American writers.She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.Gish Jen is an up-and-coming writer in the 1990 s,she has won a series of awards and honors for her deep insights into American social history and reality,her unique perspectives,and her humorous storytelling skills.Her work The Love Wife represents a new stage in her writing career.In a narrow sense,it is about a multi-ethnic Chinese family and the cultural conflicts and negotiations among its members.In a broader sense,this work further explores how people of different cultural backgrounds get along with each other in the context of globalization.This thesis,using Stuart Hall’s cultural identity theory and Stella Ting-Toomey’s identity negotiation theory,tries to analyze the identity crisis faced by different ethnic groups and identity negotiation among them in the novel The Love Wife.It focuses on how the protagonists with different cultural backgrounds interact with each other in the process of pursuing cultural identity.Through the in-depth analysis of The Love Wife,this paper hopes to help other multiracial immigrant families in the face of cultural conflicts,and also provides some enlightenment for Chinese American cultural identity negotiation in the context of globalization.