Thus, there are four acculturation strategies that could be used to see how people blend in society.
a. Integration Strategy
When there is an interest in both maintaining one’s heritage culture while in daily interactions with other groups, integration is the option 2005: 705.
b. Assimilation Strategy
When individuals do not wish to maintain their cultural identity and seek daily interaction with other cultures, the assimilation strategy is defined. Here,
individuals prefer to shed their heritage culture, and become absorbed into the dominant society 2005: 705.
c. Separation Strategy
When individuals place a value on holding on to their original culture, and at the same time wish to avoid interaction with others, then the separation
alternative is defined 2005: 705.
d. Marginalization Strategy
When there is little possibility or interest in heritage cultural maintenance often for reasons of enforced cultural loss, and little interest in having
relations with others often for reasons of exclusion or discrimination, then marginalization is defined 2005: 705.
The acculturation strategies are used by the writer to analyze the third question in the problem formulation. The writer discusses how Ruth Young
reconciles and undergoes the cultural conflicts.
4. The Relation between Literature and Society
Literature is also constructed by society in the real world. The concept of the society is dragged by the author and it becomes the imitation in the literary
work. As stated by Elizabeth Langland in Society in the Novel, she expresses “society, as do all other aspects of novels, functions as an element in a structure
that is, at least in part, self- referential” Langland, 1984: 4. Society is the aspect
and element in the novel and other literary works. Literature is using some medium as the content in its work. Wellek and
Warren in Theory of Literature are depicting that “literature ‘represents’ ‘life’;
and ‘life’ is, in large measure, a social reality, even though the natural world and the inner or subjective world of the individual have also been objects of literary
‘imitation’ Wellek and Warren, 1956: 94. The society in the real world is the object as the imitation in literary work. Hence, literature and society are connected
to each other since it is the representation from the real world and becomes the inspiration that is used to create the literary work.
C. Review of Historical, Social, and Cultural Background
China has a long history and strong culture that become a pride for the Chinese. According to Herrlee Glessner Creel in Chinese Thought, he emphasizes
that “the Chinese had long considered themselves the most cultured, the most important, and indeed the only really important people on the face of the earth
” Creel, 1953: 235.
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