Voice of the Other: Writing as Revision in Maxine Hong Kingston' s China Men

• Main Authors: Yu, Chia-jung, 余嘉蓉
• Other Authors: Huang Hsin-ya
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1997
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/17810313356356824286

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語教育研究所 === 85 === This thesis amis to analyze how Maxine Hong Kingston, as a minority woman writer, uses umlti-versions of text to speak for the silenced Other--Chinese male immigrants--in her award- winning book China Men. Her writing reclaims Chinese American subjectivity as well as deconstructs/rereads old Chinese and Western texts. As a matter of fact, she revises American history and literature. As immigrants of color, Chinese Americans have been regarded as non-white Other by the mainstream society. They are depriveof voice in canonical American literature and history. Moreover, stereotyped by the discourse of American popular culture, they are portrayed as either the insidious Fu Manchu or the docile Charlie Chan. Reflecting upon the stereotyped images, Kingston attempts to reconstruct their identity. As the book's Chinese title, Gold Mountain Heroes [Jin-shan Yong-shi, 金山勇士] suggests, she intends to identify Chinese men as abrave Gold Mountain heroes and to make them the subjects of her narrative. Indeed, inChina Men, which she designates as the father-book, she empowers the Gold Mountain heroes with a justifiable identity to succeed Abraham Lincoln as American founding fathers. To present the true stories of the Gold Mountain founding father. To present the true stories of the Gold Mountain heroes, Kingston invents the new literary structures of multi-versions of text. She adapts mother's talk-stories to represent the Chinese immigrants' life experience. Besides, she appropriates Chinese and Western literary classics, news reports, personal diaries, and articles of law to supplement their stories. The multi- versions of text form intertextual references and dialectic relationships between texts, within texts, and beyond texts. Through writing, Kingston, in effect, revises the structure and contents of the white-male-centered American history and literature. She also successfully makes the history of Chinese immigrants a part of American history.