c. Contain illustrations or photographs that are a true reflection of the way of life;
d. Depict women in transition from traditional to contemporary;
e. Contain language that provides insight into culture of the group.
Chinese American literature
American Literature Diversified --Contemporary Multiethnic Literature
I. Introduction to Ethnic Literature
A. Definition
ethnic
D. After the Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943, the number of Chinese American women writers increased.
Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant (1942) and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) are considered to be among books seeking to satisfy an American audience’s curiosity about the strangers in their midst.
The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club (1989) is a best-selling novel written by Amy Tan. It focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco, California who start a club known as "the Joy Luck Club," playing the Chinese game of mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods. The book is structured somewhat like a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections to create sixteen chapters. The three mothers and four daughters (one mother, Suyuan Woo, dies before the novel opens) share stories about their lives in the form of vignettes. Each part is preceded by a parable relating to the game.
To top it all, the appearance of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) on national best-seller lists helped to project Chinese American literature into the literary mainstream.
Chinese-American literature refers to the work by Americans of Chinese ancestry, written exclusively in English.
II. Development of Chinese American Literature
In their influential “Introduction” to Aiiieeeee!An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, Frank Chin and his coeditors defined an Asian American writer as someone who was born and raised in America of Asian ancestry.
The term ethnic has Latin and Greek origins – ethnicus and ethnikas both meaning nation.
It can and has been used historically to
refer to people as heathens. Ethos, in
The Themes of Multiethnic Literature:
a. “Manifest Destiny,” its ideology and related discourses are de-coded and critiqued.
b. The conventionalized universal history is revisioned from marginalized perspectives.
Greek, means custom, disposition or trait.
Ethnikas and ethos taken together
therefore can mean a band of people (nation) living together who share and acknowledge common customs.
A. Chinese American literature, like other ethnic literature, has long been discriminated against by the American literary canon.
B. Early Chinese American writings appeared soon after the large-scale immigration of the mid-nineteenth century.
Generally speaking, these early books disclosed a marked dissociation between their authors and the common people.
C. One of the representatives of the first Chinese American writer in English: Edith Eaton (her pen name Sui Sin Far)
E. During the Second World War, when China and the United Stated were fellow victims of Japan’s aggression, several Chinese American women wrote novels and personal accounts about the devastating effects of the war on China, and the strength and resilience of the Chinese people in order to demonstrate to the United States that China was a worthy ally.
Responding to an unfriendly environment, early Chinese immigrants managed to express their protests and complaints in various written forms.
However, the early Chinese American writers were mostly an elite group.
c. Different views of what it means to be American emerge.
d. Through “play” of language, cultural norms related to gender, race and class are de-coded and recoded.
It made the first significant impact of Chinese American literature on the popular American consciousness, and paved the way for young writers of the next decade to prove conclusively that the Chinese American voice had a powerful resonance far beyond Chinatown.
The Characteristics of Multiethnic Literature:
a. Contain text that reflect authentic and sincere portrayal of ethnic groups;
b. Attempt to amend historical errors or omissions;
e. Identity construction is explored in connection with immigrant experiences, cultural translation and contemporary politics.
f. Democracy is firmly linked with cultural pluralism.