Wayne Wang’s Quest For The Positioning And Repositioning Of The Chinese American Identity Through His Family Trilogy

In the early years of Hollywood,Chinese Americans were often portrayed in a negative or stereotypical manner,reinforcing their status as perpetual foreigners and leading to difficulties in their cultural identity.However,with the rise of Asian American cinema in the late 1960s,it began to challenge Hollywood’s hegemonic representation of Chinese Americans and seek self-representation on screen actively.As one of the earliest Chinese American filmmakers,Wayne Wang is committed to exploring Chinese American experience,with a particular passion for Chinese American family stories.In Eat a Bowl of Tea(1989),The Joy Luck Club(1993),and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers(2007),he provides an in-depth portrait of the Chinese community at different times,examining not only the positioning of Chinese Americans in mainstream American society,but also the intergenerational differences that exist within Chinese American families.However,existing literature pertinent to this "Chinese family trilogy" is limited in number and weak in succession,and although much of it focuses on identity issues,it hardly delves into Wang’s constant exploration of identity construction as reflected in the changing images of Chinese Americans in the three films.In fact,Stuart Hall argues that cultural identity is not an essence but an unstable point of identification,i.e.,a positioning,made within the discourses of history and culture.Therefore,while previous literature mainly answer the question "What kind of cultural identity has Wayne Wang constructed?",this paper draws on Hall’s concept of Three Presences in cultural identity to further explore how Wang positions and repositions Chinese American identity in his various works—how he describes his Chinese American characters in relation to the Chinese presence as an "imagined home," the American presence as a dominant power,and the New World presence as a confluence of different cultures.Through a comparative analysis of Wayne Wang’s three Chinese American films,this thesis finds that the three presences he portrays are in a constant state of transformation and evolution,which means his positioning of Chinese American identity is constantly changed.First,Chinese presence shows an overall tendency to move from the center to the periphery.Specifically,as Wang moves from portraying the inheritance and dependence of Wah Gay and Ben Loy on Chinese clan traditions in Eat a Bowl of Tea,to depicting the mothers’ attachment to the past and the daughters’ search for their ethnic self in The Joy Luck Club,and to showing Yilan’s both familiarity with and resistance to the Chinese elements brought by her father Mr.Shi in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,his characters are overall getting estranged from Chinese presence.Second,"America" in the role of the dominant has both excluded and imposed on Chinese Americans,but in Wang’s positioning is being constantly approached under their long-term aspiration for integration,In Wang’s portrayal,he moves from depicting the collective experience of political marginalization of early immigrants,to reveal in The Joy Luck Club that two generations of Chinese families have actively or passively become the "other" in mainstream American society,and in the third film,integration into America is not portrayed as a difficulty but as an active and conditional choice of the new generation of immigrants.Third,regarding New World presence,Wang first describes how Wah Gay and Ben Loy face serious existential crisis as they are caught between two cultures,and then present the clash of two cultures,where Chinese mothers and their American daughters move from conflicts to mutual understanding,and finally he shows the fusion of multiple cultures in Yilan and her father Mr.Shi.These transformations are actually the process of Chinese and American cultures moving from incompatibility to collision to infinite tendency to hybridity,which means that his Chinese American characters are more and more adapting to the new world and meanwhile,increasingly identify with their diaspora identity.In each of his three films,Wang’s construction of these presences reflects his observation,representation and artistic reproduction of reality,and holds significance in allowing us to see and recognize the different parts and histories of Chinese Americans,to construct those points of identification,those positionalities in what we call "cultural identities".