The Diary from Qutang Gorge and the letters about Donner Lake : A literary study of Mulberry and Peach by Nie Hualing

Abstract: Mulberry and Peach is a novel written in the 1970s by a Chinese American writer named Nie Hualing (1925- ). It contains overlapping letters and diaries with flashbacks and flashforwards in first-person narration. Taohong is the new identity after Sangqing’s schizophrenia in the USA in 1969-1970. The book starts with Taohong’s letter, which introduces the main female character Sangqing´s life stories, told through her diaries between 1945-the 1970s in four places of her diasporic lives from mainland China to Taiwan, then the USA. The aim of this thesis is to explore the title of the book, the prologue and the epilogue, Sangqing’s first Dairy on Qutang Gorge (1945), and the four letters from Taohong, using the close reading method and combining the theories and concepts of characterization and symbolism, impressionistic, female aesthetic, intertextuality in literature and the cultural symbols for a deep and detailed text reading analysis.