Cultural Hybridity

Jade Snow Wong's two autobiographies - Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) and No Chinese Stranger (1975) - have been highly criticized for their seemingly integrationist rhetoric. Born in the 1920s, Wong started a career of writer and potter in order to create a better understanding between China and America and to find recognition as a Chinese American woman in both worlds. However, the contradictions and conflicts that result from the encounter of both cultures in her two books foreground instead that behind Wong's apparent assimilationism hides a more subversive and undermining discourse. Taking Lisa Lowe's definition of cultural hybridity as a starting point, this study revisits Wong's works through the lens of the competing and conflicting values inherent to Jade Snow's self-definition as a Chinese American woman. Furthermore, by opposing Wong's ceramics to her autobiographies, this study seeks to give yet another perspective on Wong's cultural hybridity. Whereas words highlight the tensions between Chinese and American values, her earthenwares emphasize the harmonious combination of both traditions.