HER QUEST FOR SELF

To journey into the pages of this book is to journey into the colourful world of Chinese and Chinese-American culture, into slivers of history, into gender politics, into myth and, perhaps, even into ourselves. In the private struggles and triumphs of Pearl S. Buck’s and Amy Tan’s women characters, in their quest to re-frame and re-define themselves and their lives, echo the universal experience of women in time and space: the stories of love and loss, the yearnings and heartaches, the joys and sorrows, the laughter and the tears and, above all, their quiet strength and resilience in the face of great odds and injustices that, more often than not, have marked the female experience through generations. The book will, no doubt, strike a chord in the hearts of the readers and offer a fascinating insight into the heart of a woman’s world and, what it is to be a woman. Pearl S. Buck and Amy Tan, the two authors revisited in this book, may both be described as writers who have, in their own ways, written about the lives of women. Through their work, they challenged patriarchal assumptions about women, by attempting to fashion a distinctive feminine voice that allows for the articulation of women’s experiences in their own voices, and /or through the female perspective. This book takes a re-look at the women characters in select novels of these two writers, examining and analysing their experiences and subjectivities as they journey in quest of the self. Special attention is drawn to the role of stories/storytelling as a potent means of female expression and of bridging multifarious human divides. The urgency of reframing and reinterpreting popular myths as a way of critiquing and changing mindsets (where these need to be changed), is also explored in depth. The book is, therefore, a critical and insightful study of the works of two women that, although written in different periods, yet, intersect in these pages. The novels studied are those relating specifically to China and the Chinese/Chinese-American experience, the main subject being the Chinese woman, both in her own local space as well as outside of it. 'Storytelling enables the transmission and perpetuation of values, culture and history which, [as depicted here], are crucial to self-knowledge, and to an understanding of one’s place and identity in the universe . The self that is represented in these novels [therefore], is not a self in isolation, but a self that is a part and parcel of the human tapestry where race, gender, culture and history meet and intersect'.