THE COMPLEXITY OF CULTURAL IDENTITY IN AMY TAN’S THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER

Laili Nadhifatul Fikriya

 

Abstract

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is a diaspora novel by Amy Tan. This novel contains the story of a relationship between a Chinese immigrant mother Lu Ling and her American born Chinese daughter Ruth. This novel represents the difficulty of being the second generation of Chinese immigrant in America through the main character who experienced identity crisis because of different perception about identity between mother-daughter. The daughter assumes that the way her mother treating her is a conservative way,so she prefers to choose American culture as her role model to be accepted in dominant culture. Meanwhile a mother thinks that Chinese culture is better than American culture. This study aims to find out the process of identity formation and the survival strategy she takes to solve her identity problem. The problems are analyzed using cultural identity theory by Stuart Hall because his theory discusses some concepts which are relevant to read identity discourse. The result of this study proves that identity is a transparent product which always changes and never stops to transform itself a new because of social construction and how we position and positioned by. It comes to conclusion that the main character in the novel is used by Amy Tan as the representation to show her strategy to live as a daughter of a Chinese immigrant in USA.

 

Keywords:Process,Identity, Identity crisis