The Empowerment of Women and Regeneration of the Chinese Immigrant Community in SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe

• Main Authors: Ya-JieChen, 陳亞杰
• Other Authors: Rufus Cook
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/06688614217868584600

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 98 === SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Caf?, a story of an immigrant family which spans over a century, covers issues of racial conflict, capitalist exploitation, patriarchal domination, and gender relation. Throughout the novel, Lee creates a time-defying conversation between women in four generations. This female account of history invites a re-reading and reconsideration of a period of history in which women have been mainly marginalized. First, this thesis centers on how racial patriarchy and capitalist exploitation affects the gender relations between Chinese men and women in the domestic sphere. Through an intersecting exploration of race, class, and gender, immigrant experience is no longer restricted by Chinese men’s emasculation and discrimination. In order to demonstrate the background of immigrant experience, the second chapter illustrates how Chinese male immigrants, as cheap laborers, suffered from institutional racism enforced by capitalist patriarchy. Supported by the dichotomy and determinism permeated in colonialist ideology, this racism brought about the disempowerment of Chinese men by emasculation and led to the deterioration of patriarchy with the promulgation of the Immigrant Act. Chapter Three focuses on the empowerment of Chinese women in the domestic sphere achieved through participation in wage employment, unbalanced sex ratio, and female bond-forming. Divided as three different stages, the transformation of women is exemplified in the Wong family, from the internalization of patriarchy to awareness of transition and, finally, to the formation of empowered subjects. Chapter Four discusses the two roles played by Kea—a mother and a writer—to demonstrate the strategy Chinese Canadians need to take to negotiate between their racial, gendered, and cultural identities. By questioning the exclusiveness of patriarchy, Lee points out that the idea of family and community should be based on mutual experience and support of the inferior rather than on blood and linage only. Thus, an alternative power is offered for all the inferior and the marginalized to resort to. This thesis concludes with the affirmation of the need to re-read immigrant history from a female perspective in order to avoid simplifying and generalizing the immigrant experience as a male-centered history.