Abstract
Due to the unfair treatment towards Chinese Americans, Frank Chin, the defender of Chinese Americans nationalism, uses his writing as the counter-discourse to fight against the western hegemonic discourse and propagates the orthodox Chinese culture, aiming at reconstructing a heroic Chinese American culture tradition. This article will draw on Frank Chin’s Gunga Din Highway to analyze his subversive writing strategy, and illustrate how “the other” in the American mainstream society narrates his unique Chinese American nationalism.
Highlights
Due to the unfair treatment towards Chinese Americans, Frank Chin, the defender of Chinese Americans nationalism, uses his writing as the counter-discourse to fight against the western hegemonic discourse and propagates the orthodox Chinese culture, aiming at reconstructing a heroic Chinese American culture tradition
Frank Chin, as a forerunner of Chinese American literature, makes use of his pen as a dagger to fight against the racial prejudice in American white society, and in this way, he tries to awaken the ethnic awareness of Chinese Americans to fight for the equal rights in American society
This paper has explored Frank Chin’s “counter-discourse” —how does he make use of his literary practice as part of a strategic action to subvert the western hegemonic discourse with which the white racists impose prejudiced stereotypes on the Chinese Americans; and to reproach fiercely those Chinese Americans who have been assimilated by the western mainstream society, trying to cater to the taste of the West by self-orientalizing and vulgarizing Chinese culture and Chinese people
Summary
Since the 1960s, the rapid development of Chinese American literature has been a splendid phenomenon in the American ethnic literature. As they live in the sphere of the western culture, but they are from the Third World, if their discourse is against the mainstream discourse, they will be marginalized. Some Chinese American writers, owing to their special cultural and ethnic identity, together with the social, political condition they live in, have some deviation, distortion or even vulgarization of Chinese culture and Chinese image in their works They make use of their particular cultural status and the cultural inheritance from their Chinese predecessors to view the East from the White’s perspective, or even to orientalize China, Chinese culture and the Chinese immigrants. This phenomenon is very instructive: on one hand, it shows the tenacity of the hegemonic process in effacing the oppositional; on the other hand, it illustrates the need for the counter force to fight against neo-orientalism, subverting the conspiracy of the white racists
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