Narrating Overseas “Taiwanese Identities”: Migration and Identity Politics in Belinda Chang’s Confessions of the Woman in the Locker Room
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Belinda Chang (Chang Yuan 章緣) is among the very few Taiwanese writers whose works focus on lives of overseas Taiwanese migrants.Since the 1990s, she has published ten collections of short stories and two novels in Chinese.Despite not residing in Taiwan, she has won several prestigious literary awards on the island.Chang, a transnational migrant born in Taiwan in 1963, moved to the US in 1990 and relocated to China in 2004.While Chang's works primarily revolve around personal issues of marriage and love from the perspectives of female characters, they also present the identity struggles and transformations of Taiwanese migrants in the two countries of settlement, showing the author's views of the complicated cultural-historical relationships among the US, China, and Taiwan.By examining how overseas Taiwanese characters negotiate their Taiwanese identities in different host countries in Belinda Chang's Confessions of the Woman in the Locker Room 更衣室女人的告解 (2018), this article argues that Chang presents overseas Taiwanese characters' "Taiwanese identity" as flexible and strategic in different social contexts, which is especially demonstrated in her narratives of Taiwanese characters' relationship to Chinese people.
Source: Taiwan lit.
DOI: 10.61774/rlqh9673
Author: Phyllis Yu-ting Huang
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4408140392