A Foucauldian and Lacanian Evaluation of the Intrinsic Conflicts among Chinese American Bachelors in Eat a Bowl of Tea

Abstract

A good look taken at the analytical findings of a good many scholars who have been devoted to the studies of this novel from the perspectives of Chinatown life in relation the rich lives and experiences depicted in the production of this Chinese American novel Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) by Louis Chu on the basis of the basic needs to be met for the majority of those womanless and childless men who had been segregated from the normal participation in American mainstream life owing to the popularization of racial discrimination over there at that historical moment. It has been found in an evident fashion that fewer essential explorations have been made of the intrinsic hierarchical conflicts among Chinese American bachelors who have lived in Chinatown in reference to what has been mirrored in this novel in an authentic fashion. For the sake of the analytical inadequacy in this respect, this paper will explore how the characters’ intrinsic hierarchical conflicts with respect to their particular thoughts, profits, moralities and hierarchies have a great impact on the increasing enrichment and improvement of their rich lives and experiences in reference to those among Chinese American workers in 1970s caused by the intrinsic divergences personified in the lives and careers as a result of their actual failure to adapt themselves to American society, American culture, and American history through the historical analysis made of those characters in view of the crucial insights shaped in the development of Foucauldian historicism and Lacanian historicism. In this sense, it will be made rather evident that the profound reflection of this novel will shed some impressive lights on the further rumination of this adaption in the future.