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

Abstract

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.