Locating Identity: Interpreting Food Images and Jade Snow Wong’s Identity Construction in Fifth Chinese Daughter

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiographical novel Fifth Chinese Daughter, as an early classic of Asian American literature, has aroused wide concern since its publication, in which, food images as important elements play a prominent role in the author’s identity construction. Based on the theories of cultural identity, imagism, and feminist criticism, this paper focuses on the food images related to Jade Snow Wong’s identity construction in Fifth Chinese Daughter, and reveals the influence of these images on her identity construction. Food images in this novel, as media connecting two different cultures and genders, help break the Chinese American women’s marginalized status in culture and gender, and promote their construction of cultural identity as well as gender identity.

Download Full-text

It is More than a Bunch of Numbers: Trauma, Voicing and Identity in Jennifer Chow’s The 228 Legacy

Res Rhetorica ◽

10.29107/rr2020.4.7 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 7 (4) ◽

pp. 98-113

Author(s):

Pi-hua Ni

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Identity Construction ◽

Asian American ◽

Asian American Literature ◽

The Novel ◽

Trauma Narrative ◽

Psychological Healing ◽

Diasporic Literature ◽

Trauma Fiction ◽

Taiwanese American

This paper explores how Jennifer Chow’s The 228 Legacy (2013) recaptures the buried hi/stories of the 228 Massacre with a trauma narrative about Silk’s deep-kept secrets. It first delineates the evolution of trauma theory and trauma fiction highlighting the significance of articulating trauma and its relevance in healing, hi/storytelling and identity construction. This demarcation shall frame a critical lens to illustrate how Chow innovates distinct insulated narratives on the protagonists to mimic intergenerational ramifications of trauma in the Lu family, to represent their psychological healing and to express the association between silence-breaking, remembering and identity construction. This critical endeavor will also demonstrate that Silk’ story of survival promises the survival of hi/story. Thus, the novel proper not only portrays the traumatic impact, a nightmarish “legacy,” of 228 but also renders Silk’s trauma narrative as the “legacy” to connect with Taiwanese heritage and construct Taiwanese American identities. Given Chow’s innovative form and unique themes about trauma and Taiwanese American diaspora, the article situates her novel in the emerging Taiwanese American literature, Asian American literature, contemporary American diasporic literature and trauma fiction.

Download Full-text