The Topos of Unhomeliness: Representations of Home and Homeland in Chinese American and Tibetan Chinese Literature

This dissertation studies the representations of home and homeland in the literary works of some major writers in Chinese American and Tibetan Chinese literature. The chosen writers include Amy Tan, Frank Chin, Ha Jin, Yan Geling, Zhaxi Dawa, Alai, Pema Tseden, and Takbum Gyel. By examining their fictional and non-fictional works, this dissertation explores an interesting phenomenon: even as the writers are in their homes, they are (un)consciously haunted by a sense of homelessness, which has formed a major theme in their literary works. According to the current scholarship of Asian American and Tibetan Chinese literature, the anxiety over home for Chinese American and Tibetan Chinese writers comes from different sources. While for the former is rooted in their ancestral home, for the latter is derived from the loss of traditional home. This dissertation argues that the anxiety over home for both ethnic groups is much more complicated than it is recognized. For the Chinese American writers, the anxiety figures in literary representations of Tan’s disharmonious home, Chin’s estranged home, Ha Jin’s transitional homeland, and Yan’s dualistic homeland. In those representations, the home loses its homeliness in the conflict between the mother and daughter, the dispute between the father and son, the rootless movement from filiation to affiliation, and the fruitless search for an ideal home. For the chosen Tibetan Chinese authors, the anxiety is represented as Zhaxi Dawa’s hybrid homeland, Alai’s universal homeland, Pema Tseden’s incompatible home, and Takbum Gyel’s transitional homeland. In those writers’ works, the home loses its simplicity, uniqueness, harmony, and authenticity as a result of the hybridity of primitivity and modernity, the merge into modern history, the confrontation between tradition and modernity, and the transition from the old era to the new one. By analyzing the images of home and homeland in the two ethnic minority groups’ literature, the dissertation argues that the home plays different roles in the two group of writers’ writing careers. For Chinese American writers, it is like a haunting ghost, which stimulates both love and hate; for Tibetan Chinese writers, it is a changing muse, whose transformations make it difficult for them to show their love for it. The difference comes from the different nature of their identities and structures of feelings. Each group’s identity consists of two parts: one natural and the other national. The dominant variant and the recessive variant of their identities are opposite. The opposite determinants of the dominant and the recessive variants are responsible for different representations of home and homeland in the Chinese American and Tibetan Chinese writers’ works.