earticle

영어

Nowadays, the borders between countries have started to disappear. Traditional concepts of national identity and national culture are being replaced by new global identities. In the past, Asian immigrants arriving in the West were marginalized and suffered much when confronted by new and unfamiliar languages and cultures. However, the second or third generations of the original immigrants and the financially successful and educated new immigrants have started to enjoy a significantly enhanced quality of life, without feeling any barriers due to language. These changes are very evident in the works of contemporary Asian-American women writers such as Kim Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things and Caroline Hwang’s In Full Bloom. The main point of this article is to analyze the problem of self/ethnic/cultural identity of intelligent Asian-American women in these two writers’ works. These young women writers use satire and humor, imitating and subverting the conventional plot of a sentimental mother-daughter relationship or a spiritual trip to the motherland. Their works sometimes appear less sincere and very shallow like a popular love story. However, they very effectively show how these intelligent, young women suffer from the humiliation of being stereotyped by an invisible racism towards Asians which is cloaked behind the policy of multiculturalism. Even though they have been assimilated into the mainstream of white society almost perfectly, their ethnic identity is still unstable.