Panel: Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Negotiations
Copanelists: Matilda Gabrielpillai and Dejin Xu
In Chinese-American literary history, women writers count a lot, and their life writings in particular are of immense significance in that those works have delineated the struggling path of Chinese- Americans and especially Chinese-American women, from plea and protest to conscious selfdefinition and articulate self-expression.
Edith Eaton, although she could have passed as white, assumed a typical Chinese pen name, Sui Sin Far (Water Fragrant Flower—the narcissus), and wrote to emphasize her Chinese heritage during a period of virulent anti-Chinese sentiment at the turn of the twentieth century. She published her memoir Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian in 1909, narrating gracefully her painful experience of growing up in prejudiced nineteenth-century England, Canada, and America, and breaking, for the first time, the silence of Chinese-Americans torn between worlds. Jade Snow Wong, an American-born Chinese daughter in an immigrant family, with the release in 1950 of her autobiography Fifth Chinese Daughter, became known for her resolution of the conflict between the traditions of her ancestors and the values of her adopted country. And Maxine Hong Kingston, a highly acclaimed memoirist since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, has aroused wide academic interest and public concern on issues like sexism and racism suffered by Chinese-American women, and the self-definition of Chinese-Americans straddling two cultures.
This paper, focusing on autobiographical facts in these three life writing works, with analysis of their respective socio-historical contexts, is a study of how the three Chinese-American women writers successfully translated into words their experiences, including things that happened to them and that they made happen, and their inner experiences, such as their feelings and thoughts on the process of acculturation.
Zhong Yan is currently a Lecturer in English at China Agricultural University in Beijing. In 2007 she taught Chinese-American literature as an exchange teacher at the University of Mainz. She received her BA degree in English Language and Literature from Hunan Normal University in 1998, and her MA degree in Comparative Literature and World Literature from Peking University in 2005. Her research interests include Chinese-American literature and ecocriticism. She has co-authored six books on English language learning and English literature, and has published several articles on ecocriticism in academic journals.