The Chinese ‘Gold Mountain’: the Chinese Immigrants’ Experience in the West in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to highlight the way the Chinese people perceive the West: the region of liberty and the land of opportunity. This study will be conducted in the light of Chinese American writer, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. The paper proposes that the Chinese immigrants are no more in need of “Anglo- conformity” in modern America (Kymlicka 14). The extent of space, America gives to her immigrants, is making this State of America “gold mountain” for those who find themselves “slaves” in their indigenous land (Kingston 1- 11). Furthermore, this paper will bring forth the circumstances, under which these Chinese immigrants see America as a place giving space to individuals, to discover their identity in the adopted land through “dialogue with others” (Bakhtin 116; Taylor 34). The nature of socio- cultural gap between these Chinese and their indigenous land-living, leading to fascination for America, is also a prime focus of this paper. Thus, presenting forth America as a tract of diversity, this paper will place the Chinese people as observers in the West. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club will be used as secondary text. For an in-depth analysis, theoretical frame work comprising Will Kymalick’s Multicultural Citizenship and Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ will be applied to approach the literary texts.