美国华裔文学(英语)

Resistance to the Vietnam War
• rift between young people and their parents--generation gap • protesters becoming tenured faculty at American colleges
Maxine Hong Kingston 1940 Fa源自文库her: Tom Hong, a first-generation immigrant from China, owned a laundry in Stockton, California. Mother: Ying Lan (Chew) Hong ("Brave Orchid"), first-generation immigrant from China
Ethnic literary activism and challenge to the “canon”
- Women quickly become recognized in literature
and other fields - New left challenges democratic ideals, objects and methods of literary studies - Mainstream literature teachers (and readers) quickly picked up the call to look at neglected material
It is in the “Shaman” chapter that the girl’s conflict with her mother is reconciled. “We have no more China to go home to,” the aged Brave Orchid laments. The girl says, “I am really a dragon, and she is a dragon, both of us were born in dragon years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter.”
The “Shaman” chapter tells of the mother’s passage from a traditional woman to a doctor. In the course of her time at the school in Canton, she enlists the other students in exorcising a ghost.
In “No Name Woman” she recounts a brutal story of a suicide in the family that the narrator’s mother warns her not to repeat. The story is told to a teenage girl to warn her about the consequences of sex: You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as though she never existed.
The Women’s Movement
Developed largely out of the Civil Rights Movement Civil Rights Act of 1964 had a few provisions about gender equality • 1966 National Women’s Organization organized (NOW)
外国文学史
华裔美国文学
Maxine Hong Kingston
The Historical Background
• The decade of the 1960s had a huge influence on the direction of Chinese American Literature • The civil rights movement • New immigration laws • Resistance to the Vietnam War • Rise of feminism • Ethnic literary activism
The March to Washington •
Civil Rights Movement
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Civil Rights Movement • - Rapid change in ethnic consciousness of non-white Americans • - Beginning of change of attitude of white Americans
Husband: Earll Kingston, actor Son: Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei, born in 1964

Born in 1940
Chronology 1940: born in Stockton, California 1962: graduates from the University of California, Berkeley 1962: marries Earll Kingston, a classmate at Berkeley 1964: gives birth to son, Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei 1965: earns a teaching certificate and begins teaching high school
The last chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” , the narrator addresses her early inability to speak. In
elementary school she confronts and attacks a Chinese girl who won’t speak. It is clear that the girl is really a double for herself.
Civil Rights Movement
• Civil rights movement: • The focus was to improved conditions for black Americans • Apply the same standards to whites and blacks
The second section of the book, “White Tigers”, is a fantasy about a female avenger, Fa Mu Lan. “White Tigers” apparently refers to western influence in China, so it is Chinese and American Fa Mu Lan learns martial arts from an old couple, decapitates a misogynist old baron, and returns to a life as daughter, wife, and mother.
The Woman Warrior
China Men

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To Be the Poet
The Fifth Book of Peace
The Woman Warrior
Woman Warrior is divided into five distinct parts: No Name Woman, White Tigers, Shaman, At the Western Palace, and A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe. The stories are loosely woven together in what she calls a “mother book” – a book that eventually reconciles mother and daughter.
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Ethnic literary activism and challenge to the “canon”
• - The “great tradition in western literature” called “works of dead white men” • - Jessie Jackson : “There is a broad body of people in this country across the lines of race, religion, regions, and sex who desperately want new directions within this country and new connections with other people and forms of government”
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1967: moves to Hawaii 1976: The Woman Warrior: Memoires of a Girlhood Among Ghosts begins teaching English at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu 1980: China Men 1981: receives Guggenheim Fellowship begins teaching at University of California, Berkeley 1989: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book 2001: To Be the Poet 2003: The Fifth Peace Book

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Resistance to the Vietnam War
• - 1960 to 1973. (1968 was the hottest year of war protests) • - Intellectuals started the opposition • - Students took over the fights • dispute mainly within the white community, paralleled civil rights
In “At the Western Palace” the narrator’s mother Brave Orchid implores her sister Moon Orchid to reclaim her husband, who is married to an American woman. Moon Orchid, just arrived from Hong Kong, does not want to do this. Brave Orchid forces a meeting, which results in Moon Orchid’s being crazy.