Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: This thesis aims to reveal the marriage conception of Leila in Bone by analyzing Leila’s attitudes toward both her mother’s two marriages and her own marriage with Mason. Moreover, this thesis tries to find out the causes of the formation of the marriage concept of Leila by analyzing the text from two aspects: firstly, the shadow of bachelor society on every aspect of the Chinese-American community, which indicates that Chinese Americans suffer great racial discrimination; secondly, the influences of both traditional Chinese culture and American culture, which show the conflicts and integration between traditional Chinese culture and American culture.

Key Words: Bone; bachelor society; marriage concept; traditional Chinese culture; American culture

摘要：本文旨在通过分析莱拉对其母亲两次婚姻的看法及对待自己与梅森的婚姻的态度来揭示莱拉的婚姻观。本文还试图从两个方面探寻莱拉婚姻观的成因：一是美国华人社区“单身汉社会”的阴影，从而折射出美国华人遭受巨大的种族歧视；二是中美两国文化的影响，从而客观地展现中美两国文化的冲突与融合。

关键词：《骨》；单身汉社会；婚姻观；中国传统文化；美国文化

1.    Introduction
1.1    Fae Myenne Ng’s Literary Achievements
Fae Myenne Ng was born in 1956, the same year the McCarthyesque Chinese Confession Program was sanctioned, in San Francisco’s Chinatown where her parents settled down after they had immigrated from China in 1940. She grew up in a hard-working family: her mother worked as a sewing lady in a garment factory, and her father was a cook in a university in California. At her early age in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Fae Myenne Ng came into contact with the early immigrants who viewed their dwellings in America as temporary and who expected that their bones could be sent back to their motherland (China) after death.
Fae Myenne Ng spent over ten years on her first novel Bone. Some of the chapters in Bone were in print as short stories before the book was published; the most famous is “A Red Sweater” which was printed in The American Voice in 1986. After its publication, Bone received widespread and favorable critical attention. Because of the great success of Bone, Fae Myenne Ng was rewarded with many awards and writing grants such as the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Mcdowell Fellowship, and a Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2008, her second novel Steer Toward Rock was finished and published by Hyperion. In addition to novels, she is also famous for short stories, most of which are included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology.