INTERNATIONAL, CULTURE: Chinese-American writers

By Xu Yan

Chinese people have gone to every corner of the world. But wherever they've gone, they have never dropped their habit of using the power of the pen to keep culture alive and record new experiences. Gradually they generated a group of English language Chinese writers who have had a great influence on world literature.

The ancestor of such writers is a woman whose penname was Daffodil in the early 1900's. But it was not until the 1920's that a really popular book appeared, written by the princess Delin, who described the secrets of the Qing dynasty in detail from the vantage point of her special identity. During the 1930's, the famous man of letters, Lin Yutang, surprised the English world by writing even more beautifully than the native writers.

Since then, female writers occupied the Chinese-American writing world. Zhang Ailing, Li Jingyang, Han Suyin and Ni Hualing, all gained high fame in the English speaking world. However, there were still no professional critics analyzing Chinese-American writers.

It was Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts that attracted the world’s eyes to Chinese-American writers. The book mixed Chinese fairy tales, legends, opera stories and the accomplishment of the American dream together; it even stimulated a number of colleges to open courses about female Chinese writers. During this period, female writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, who were second or third generation immigrants, were mainly concerned with Chinese people's experiences in America.

Then came the new immigrant writers--who were born in China and received higher education in China--to prevail on the literary world. Those writers were mainly male, like Ha Jin and Qiu Xiaolong, who wrote about Chinese people in contemporary China. Ha Jin's most well-known book, Waiting, about a doctor at an army hospital in China, won two major American prizes, the American Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner Award. And Qiu Xiaolong, who used to be a famous translator in China, was good at the detective story. His Death of a Red Heroine won the Allen Poe Whodunit Prize.

Having addressed the three generations of Chinese-American writers, we may ask how can they conquer the English-speaking world? It's owing to the characters these books have in common, that is, adopting a method which the Westerner can accept to represent China.

Many Americans have the impression that Chinese writers are too sensational as they use a lot of adjectives, which may move Chinese readers. Americans prefer concise, powerful diction, like Ha Jin's. Besides, those successful writers base their books on a successful plot. They will add elements of China, such as traditional poetry and well-known fables into their books. But they will not write of China for China's sake. That is the most difficult part.

It is easy to understand why writers like Amy Tan write in English as they were born American. But for those like Ha Jin, who adopt English as a second language, why do they choose to write English works? Ha Jin's answer is typical: he does it by chance and writing in English gives him freedom.

Whatever reasons or aims they have, and although their works can hardly be accepted in China (actually, their works receive very little attention in their motherland), they are making the effort to tell the world about a real China. And it is encouraging.