which he laments that there was a time in which he believed he was the peach boy, born to an old woman and a Japanese warrior. There was also a time in which he was only half Japanese because “one is not born in America and raised in America and taught in America and one does not speak and swear and drink and smoke and play and fight and see and hear in America among Americans in American streets and houses without becoming American and loving it.” Ichiro refuses to join the military during World War II, partly because of his loyalty to his parents and partly because of his resentment of the mistreatment Japanese Americans have experienced. After he is released from prison, his search for his identity leads him to the conclusion that he is just as Japanese as he is American.

In Chinese American writer Amy Tan’s critically acclaimed The Joy Luck Club (1989), the author portrays a group of second-generation Chinese Americans’ search for their ontological connection with their ethnic cultural heritage. After Suyuan Woo passes away, Jing-mei Woo is asked by members of the Joy Luck Club to replace her mother at the mah-jongg table. At first, she is reluctant. Although she half-heartedly accepts her Chinese name and tells her “aunties” that it is “becoming fashionable for American-born Chinese to use their Chinese names,” she is not aware of the fact that it is impossible for her to find her identity without reclaiming her relationship with her ethnic cultural heritage. After joining the Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei starts to understand her mother. She finally realizes that “Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese.” Her trip to China enables her to see that together with her sisters, they look just like their mother, her “same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.” The Joy Luck Club also deals with issues related to gender identity. Ying-ying St. Clair has been struggling with her identity throughout her life. As a little girl in China, she is told by people around her that a “girl can never ask, only listen,” a “boy can run and chase dragonflies, because that is his nature,” but “a girl should stand still.” She is also told that woman is “yin, the darkness within where untempered passions” lie and man is “yang, bright truth lighting our minds.” After she and Clifford St. Clair are married, Clifford starts to tell people that he has “saved her from a terrible life” in China. He also replaces her Chinese name (Gu Ying-ying) with an American name, Betty St. Clair, and puts down the wrong birth year when they first come to the United States. The “sweep” of Clifford’s pen not only changes Ying-ying’s name and birth year, it also threatens to obliterate her identity by cutting her off from her culture and her past. Ying-ying’s insistence on using her Chinese first name, therefore, takes on a thematic significance.

Conflict has always been an important subject in literature. It has a direct bearing on writers’ thematic concerns. In much American literature, tragedy is closely tied to characters’ confusion about their identity. Their emotional sufferings are frequently occasioned by their inability to overcome the crisis. T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” uses the dramatic monologue form to depict a person’s wavering between wanting to be himself and the familiar comforts of an emotionally closed, drawing-room life. Prufrock is a middle-aged man who feels attracted and repulsed by a room symbolic of highbrow society. He oscillates between a reality filled with “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” and a room in which “women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.” The narrator’s problem is not that he does not know who he is, but that he lacks the courage to be who he is. The conflict between his true and false identities vividly portrays a modern tragedy: not one in which the hero dies but one in which the hero lives an unheroic life. The poem ends with the narrator’s capitulation: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) is another modern tragedy. The main character Willy Loman has been unable to resolve his identity crisis throughout his life. Willy’s sometimes contradictory behavior underlines the intensity of the war within himself. It reveals the conflict between Willy the innocent and Willy the imposter. Publicly, Willy teaches his sons received and accepted values. When he is by himself, Willy wonders if he is teaching his children the right kind of values. The Willy in public is all business. He warns his children about the importance of appearance and speech: “And don’t say ‘Gee’. ‘Gee’ is a boy’s word. A man walking in for fifteen thousand dollars does not say ‘Gee’!” Willy in private displays his aesthetic sense: “Gee, look at the moon moving between the buildings.” Willy the salesman makes a living, or fails to, with his appearance and mouth. The true Willy enjoys working with his hands. After Willy commits suicide, his son Biff suggests that Willy’s problem is not only that “he had the wrong dreams,” but also that “he never knew who he was.”

Together with love and death, the identity crisis has consistently demonstrated its thematic power in literature. Its portrayal challenges readers to think about their own relationship with society, to elevate their self-awareness to a higher level, and to pursue and achieve self-realization.