Nomadic Desire: The Schizo-Identity in "Mona in the Promised Land"

Abstract

This paper aims to explore a nomadic desire of the second-generation Chinese-Americans in Gish Jen's "Mona in the Promised Land". The paradigm of diaspora in the United States has shifted from the moved-to-here immigrants to born-here immigrants, from the longing for the re-turn to the authentic origin to the longing for the emergence of a self-affirmative nomadic subjectivity. Mona, the heroine of the novel, torn between the anxious hope of being firmly rooted and the imminent fear of being fully totalized, is lost and wanders from place to place in her nomadic journey of identity. In this paper, I will mainly use Deleuzo-Guattarian theory to explore the idea of nomadic desire, a simultaneous double-desire of the nomadic subject per se. Then I hope, within this theoretical framework of nomadic desire, to cast light upon the emerging identity problems of the America-Born Chinese in this novel