ABSTRACT
Dislocation in China during World War II (1937-45) and its social and cultural consequences were underrepresented in fiction and film, in Chinese or English, until recently. Focusing on two well-received American ethnographic novels and their film adaptations with the same titles, The Joy Luck Club and Pavilion of Women, my paper aims to examine certain fictional/filmic appropriation of wartime China by these ethnographic writers and filmmakers for their respective cultural and aesthetic purposes. And in the examination of the relationships between these literary and cinematic works pertaining to the war themes, the film adaptation of The Joy Luck Club is found faithful to the original with great cinematic fulfillment, whereas the film Pavilion of Women deviates drastically from the novel it is based on, lost in the page-to-screen transformation.
Keywords: Cross-Culture, Ethnography, Sino-Japanese War, Fictional, Cinematic.