Transcultural herstories exploring memory language and space in select chinese american womens narratives

Abstract

This thesis examines select personal and fictional narratives by select Chinese American women writers, namely, Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Lisa See, Yiyun Li, and Jean Kwok, to understand how they actively negotiate and embrace their transcultural subjectivities within the contact zones of memory, language, and space, thereby constructing multi-faceted herstories of migration, adaptation, and integration into American sociocultural spheres. It uses the idea of “herstories” to advance gendered, racialised, and historically positioned perspectives that resist dominant cultural narratives, asserting that the select texts are not merely accounts of migration but complex narratives shaped by the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. The introduction situates Chinese American women’s writing as a subset of the wider discipline of Asian American literature and posits the central question: how do these writers negotiate multiple subject positions within the transcultural contexts of American sociocultural life? Drawing on theoretical concepts such as transculturation, contact zones, intersectionality, and Asian American feminist criticism, the study seeks to move beyond assimilationist or binary models of identity. Chapter One focuses on the personal narratives of Wong, Kingston, and Tan, showcasing how memory operates as a metaphorical space where personal trauma, cultural memory, and generational tensions are negotiated through experimental narrative forms. Chapter Two examines how language functions as a site of identity-making in the writings of Kingston, Tan, Li, and Kwok, engaging with issues such as bilingualism, language anxiety, linguistic hybridity, and linguistic exile. Chapter Three considers physical spaces in selectnovels by See and Kwok, including homes, Chinatowns, schools, and dance studios, as contact zones that both constrain and facilitate the formation of transcultural identity. These spaces reflect the pressures of racial and gendered hierarchies but also stimulate possibilities for performance, upliftment, and emotional connection. The thesis concludes that these narratives construct transcultural subjectivities not through fixed categories but through ongoing processes of adaptation, contradiction, and negotiation.