TRAUMA AND RECOVERY: A LITERARY PRAGMATIC READING OF CHINESE AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE KITCHEN GOD’S WIFE

This paper conducts a literary pragmatic study on the linguistic representation of Chinese American women’s trauma and its recovery on the basis of specific textual analysis, with the novel The Kitchen God’s Wife by Chinese American writer Amy Tan as a case. As a result, it is found that the linguistic representation of trauma as well as the recovery vary in terms of lexicon, grammar and speech acts. Specifically, the symptoms of the heroine’s trauma are composed through the use of hedges, mixed narrative tenses, and directive speech acts; the causes of her trauma are highlighted via the use of imperative if-conditional sentences and directive speech acts by the people around her; her efforts to gradually recover from the trauma are framed in her increasing use of positive adjectives, narrative tenses with explicit adverbials of time, and assertive speech acts. All these findings not only shed new light on interpreting women’s trauma from a pragmatic perspective, but also enrich the veins of Chinese American literature and trauma literature analysis.