Toward a Postmodern Self: On the Construction and Fragmentation of Identity in Chuang Hua’s Crossings

Abstract

(Review of Crossings by Chuang Hua, New York: The Dial Press, 1968; reprint, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Northeastern University Press, 1986.) Before the success of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston,1 few readers in America were even aware of the existence of Asian American literature. With rare exceptions, works written by Asian American writers, if they were fortunate enough to get published, would attract little critical attention and go quickly out of print. This was the fate of Chuang Hua's Crossings, published just a few years before the beginning of scholarly activity devoted to Asian American literature, before the civil rights movement and women's movement that awakened mainstream interest in literary treatments of ethnic experi? ence and the lives of women of color. The late Chinese American scholar Amy Ling, who rediscovered the book and reintroduced it to the reader in 1986, hailed Crossings as "a major landmark in Asian American literature" and "Asian America's first modernist novel."2 In the novel, Chuang Hua writes about the emotional pain and suffering of an upper-class Chinese immigrant family that faces crisis in its cultural identity. Unlike more well-known works, such as The Woman Warrior and The Joy Luck Club? which depict the generational conflict in the relationship between immigrant mothers and American-born daughters, the central conflict in Crossings is revolved around the father-daughter relationship. Since its reprint in 1986, the critical attention that Crossings attracted had focused largely on the novel's central theme, the protagonist, Fourth Jane's, search for self-identity.4 In this essay, I am instead, analyzing another, frequently overlooked aspect of the novel, i.e., the father-daughter conflict. I am presenting the father as representative of the modern Chinese-American Man, and the identity he has constructed and as bearing the unique features of Chinese-American modernity in the early twentieth century. Moreover, I see Fourth Jane as portraying a postmodern character who displays the character-traits of irrationality,