论文总字数：29680字
摘 要
文学作品是一个国家文化的生动写照。上世纪涌现一大批美籍华人作家撰写的，关于中美文化冲突与融合的小说，其中最杰出的代表作之一是谭恩美的小说《喜福会》。这部小说受到了广泛欢迎和好评并被多次改编为好莱坞同名电影。《喜福会》讲述了四个美籍华人家庭母女两代的故事。小说中所反映的中美文化冲突与融合的过程是通过母女关系从误解、冲突到沟通、理解这一过程体现出来的。因此,本篇论文将从母女关系这一视角来详细解读中美两种文化的矛盾与对立，两种文化交流和融合的过程以期中美文化融洽共存。
关键词：小说；《喜福会》 ；文化冲突与融合；母女关系；和睦共处。
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Literature Review.................................................................................2
3. Cultural Conflicts between Mothers and Daughters 4
3.1 Different ways of education 5
3.2 Different viewpoints on marriage and love 6
3.3 Different Language.........................................................................7
4. Cultural Understanding and Integration Reflected in the Harmonious Mother-daughter Relationships 8
4.1 The communications between mothers and daughters and changes of education style 8
4.2 Daughters’ understanding and respect of their mothers 9
5. Exploring the Methods for the Harmonious Coexistence of Chinese and American Culture 10
5.1 To preserve and promote traditional Chinese culture 11
5.2 To seek commom ground while shelving differences 11
6. Conclusion 13
Works Cited 14
1. Introduction
Amy Tan，also known as An-Mei Tan, is a world-famous Chinese-American writer. She was born in 1952 in Oakland, California. As a teenager, Amy was crazy about merging with the American society. Erasing her Chinese identity: her Chinese appearance, accent, customs, etc. was her struggle throughout her youth. Life became even harder for her when her father and elder brother died when she was only fifteen. Her mother moved Amy and her younger brother John Jr. to Switzerland where Amy finished high school. During this period, Amy learned about her mother"s former marriage to an abusive man in China, their four children (a son who died as a toddler, and three daughters) and how her mother was forced to leave her children from a previous marriage in Shanghai. In 1987 Amy travelled with her mother to China. There, Amy met her three half-sisters. This incident provided the basis for Amy"s first novel ---- 1989 New York Times bestseller --- The Joy Luck Club. This book won her National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award as well as many other awards.
Amy Tan received her bachelor"s and master"s degrees in English and linguistics from San José State University and later did doctoral linguistics studies at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. The Kitchen God"s Wife(1991) Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, (1994) and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), etc. are her other renowned novels.
The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan’s first and best known novel. In the book, the Joy Luck Club is created by four immigrant Chinese women settled in San Francisco where they play Chinese Mahjong together regularly. Gradually the club becomes a spiritual heaven where they pour hearts to each other. The novel alternates from the tragic and miserable lives of the four mothers in pre-Revolutionary China to the modern and chaotic lives of the daughters in the 20th century in America. Apparently, the mothers, clinging to Chinese traditions, view the world with their experience from previous life in China while their daughters, all American-born, can’t understand Chinese culture. So conflicts constantly happen between them. After a series of confrontations and fights, the two generations begin to understand each other and they are finally brought together by their mutual deep love.
Written in 1989, a time of profound changes around the world, The Joy Luck Club was intended to unveil the mysterious Chinese culture to the Western world. The book is a huge success and won Amy Tan a great many literature awards.
The later half of the 20th century has witnessed a world trend of seeking cultural roots. Nations around the world looked for the roots of their nation"s culture from different areas. China also embraced the trend of the times which is best exemplified by those overseas Chinese who devoted a great deal of enthusiasm to traditional Chinese culture and created large numbers of literary works. One of the most representitive one is The Joy Luck Club. As the second-generation immigrants in America and other countries, writers like Amy Tan have a much deeper understanding of the Western culture than their parents who, as first-generation immigrants, neither totally integrate in the Western world nor discard Chinese traditions and their lives in China. In such a complicated cultural background of the world, The Joy Luck Club is a vivid reflection of such cultural clashes.
What is more, Amy Tan’s mother divorced with an abusive man in China but she lost custody of her three daughters. She was forced to leave them alone when she escaped on the last boat to Shanghai in 1949. This event shocked Amy Tan greatly and became the source of her creation.
2. Literature Review
During the past thirty years, there appeared a flourishing development of Chinese American literature. Amy Tan, a famous contemporary Chinese American writer, promotes the integration of Chinese American culture in her way. Her first book The Joy Luck Club, published in 1949, won the Bay Ares Book Reviewers award for best book fiction and the American Library Association award for best book for young adults, and was a nominee for the prestigious National Book critics Circle award. In1994, it was translated into 20 languages. Thus Amy Tan became the best writer among the Chinese American people overnight.
For 20 years it attracts wide attention of the public at home and abroad. Readers and critics place high expectations on The Joy Luck Club. Western scholars mainly focus on the theme of the feminist，because Amy’s novels are mainly concerned with female. For instance, in 2008, Zhao Ying published a paper entitled “Analysis of The Joy Luck Club from the Perspective of Feminist”, which pointed out that under men’s suppression and persecution women manifested an image of braveness .
Chinese critics began their research on Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club in 1993. Their critics concentrate on the Chinese Americans’ identity as the important subjects of The Joy Luck Club. Identity is a popular term in today’s politics, sociology, anthropology, and literature. It also becomes a hot topic in literature. In 1994, a well-known scholar compiled a book “Cultural Identity and Chinese American Literature”. A student named Ma Huiqing, graduating from Northwest University, released a master paper entitled “On the Cultural Identity of the Chinese American: A Cultural Interpretation of The Joy Luck Club”, the thesis mainly revealed the cultural significance in the mother-daughter relationship, and the cultural identity of the Chinese-American portrayed in the novel. As for the cultural identity of the Chinese American, he held that American and Chinese were looking for their roots. Finally he tried to mix the two unbalanced cultures so that Chinese American people realized the double cultural identity is possible.
Identity is closely related to culture, and thus many critics explore the theme of the cultural conflicts between eastern and western cultures as manifested by the conflicts of mother-daughter contradictions. In 2010, Cheng Aimin and Zhang Ruihua released a paper “Conflicts and Assimilation Between Chinese and American Culture: A Cultural Reading of The Joy Luck Club”, in which they clarify how Tan displays the differences, conflicts and fusion of the two cultures by depicting mothers and daughters’ misunderstanding and conflicting with each other, as well as their mutual understanding and reconciling in the end. And Li Ying wrote a paper entitled “Value Difference and Cross-cultural Awareness”, this thesis is to probe the intercultural communication problems of values differences and cross-cultural awareness. In addition, the aticle attempts to draw readers’ attention to the unpleasant consequences of the problems and helps them to solve the conflicts in intercultural communication. In 2008, Wang Yi discussed the effect of Chinese and American cultures on the daughters in The Joy Luck Club, he argued that the influence of Chinese and American cultures on the daughters is very impressive, no matter in marriage, values and outlook. In 2005, Wu Dian-Long wrote “A Survey of Mother-daughter Contradictions in The Joy Luck Club from Culture Differences”. It discusses the conflicts between mothers and daughters and it makes an analysis of the reasons for the collisions of mothers and daughters. He held that the collision stemed from the following aspects: different cultural natural and historical conditions, and different social systems.
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From the above investigation, we can see that most of the critics mainly focus on the theme of the conflict and integration between eastern culture and western culture, the cultural identity and so on, so my paper is intended to analyze the conflict and collision of Chinese and American cultures from Mother-Daughter relationships. By means of interpreting the main characters’ conflict and reconciliation, this paper is meant to explore the possibility of the integration of two cultures so that the readers can gain a better understanding of the novel The Joy Luck Club as well as the inner world of Amy Tan, especially the Chinese-American people.
3. Cultural Conflicts between Mothers and Daughters
In the book, Amy Tan describes a lot of conflicts and fights between the four mothers and daughters from various aspects: education, marriage and love, different languages, etc. All these conflicts and fights stem from the very different cultural backgrounds they come from: mothers come from the old China which is of feudal patriarchy and isolation from the rest of the world while daughters are born in America which is of gender equality and openness to the outside. Under such circumstances, conflicts are unavoidable.
3.1 Different ways of education
The Joy Club mothers move to America with the purpose of having a better life for themselves and their future generations and they sometimes asked themselves whether they had achieved this goal, whether they had their daughters away from Chinese traditions. So they were very strict with their daughters in nearly everything.
Suyuan Woo is determined to cultivate her daughter Jin-Mei into a talented girl, a child like Shirley Temple. When this dream is disillusioned, she cuts out some intelligence tests from magazines for her daughter and sadly concluds that her daughter is not a whiz-kid. However, parents always have the willpower to do anything for their children. Suyuan Woo then works as a dustman in a rich family to trade for her daughter’s chance to learn to play the piano in this family. Little Jin-Mei, determined to break her mother’s “foolish arrogance”, deliberately behaves badly in her piano concert. Finally, Jin-Mei adheres to her own freedom and gets rid of her mother’s manipulation. For Chinese parents, they all wish for the success for their children and they have rights to make decisions for their children’s future: college, marriage, career, etc. However, as born in the open and modern America, Jin-Mei is prone to a more democratic American educational environment. The mother’s order that “only obedient daughter can live in the house”(Tan Enmei 56) makes Jin-Mei consider herself a slave rather than a daughter to her mother. She thinks she deserves equality and democracy just as the white children do. It is without doubt that the two love each other deeply but they can’t understand and communicate with each other because of the different cultures they represent.
The mothers in the The Joy Luck Club hope that their daughters can get close to them as they are to their own mothers in China. For example, Am-mei’s grandmother tells her that her mother is a ghost. She says so to make Am-mei forget about her mother. Although Am-mei hasn’t seen her mother for years, she loves it when her mother combs her hair, as if they do this everyday. And Am-mei says,“This is how a daughter loves her mother. It is so deep it is in your bones.”(Tan Enmei 41) when she sees her mother cut her flesh to cook soup for her grandmother.
But in America, children do not follow all that their parents’orders and they do anything they want to. They pay attention to their individuality and they don’t have such deep relationships with their mothers. So when Lindo asks her daughter Waverly to finish her coffee, Waverly says:“Don’t be so old fashioned, Ma. I’m my own person.”(Tan Enmei 227) However, Lindo thinks she will always love her daughter, and she never gives her daughter up.
3.2 Different viewpoints of marriage and love
Suppressed and fettered by the feudal patriarchy in old China, the mothers in The Joy Luck Club run away from their poor and war-torn homes to America. Here they begin a new life. They look for new jobs, fall in love with new men and have a new family. They become the masters of their own destinies. Although they break away from their previous life, thousand years of traditional Chinese educations and feudalism are deeply rooted in their bones. Even though they try their utmost to hide their personalities based on traditional Chinese culture, they still influence their daughters in a profound way.
Lindo Jong was born in a poor family in northern China. Years of natural disasters force her to be the “child bride” to a rich family. Young Lindo, resourceful and clever, gets rid of her tragic marriage using a series of tricks. Her daughter, Waverly falls in love with an American boy Rick who offends Waverly’s mother without realizing it and Waverly is very afraid of her mother’s disapproval of this American-style marriage. Although holding a grudge against her mother, she does everything possible to get her mother’s blessings and permission for this marriage. Her friend Lena hears about Waverly’s situation and tells her to ask her mother to “shut up.” Daughters saying “shut up” to their mothers is unknown to Chinese culture. Waverly, though having a smattering sense of Chinese filial piety, knows that anyone saying “shut up” to mother will be “accused of being accomplices to murderers”.(Tan Enmei 189) So, she lived in the miserable contradiction of antipathy towards her mother’s interference in her marriage on one hand and her irresistible love towards her mother on the other. This is a perfect example of the different marriage values owing to different cultural traditions. Lindo Jong and Waverly have the fight over Waverly’s marriage because the daughter has already been an so called ABC (American-born Chinese) while the mother still handls their mother-daughter relations in old-fashioned Chinese way.
3.3 Different Languages
In the novel, the communication is also a huge problem between mothers and daughters. The mothers are from China, while daughters are born in the US, they have different cultural backgrounds, and they speak different languages. For example, Rose cannot find the right English terms to the Chinese “Hulihudu” and “Heimongmong”. “A mother is best. A mother knows what is inside you,” she said…“A psyche-atricks will only make you hulihudu, make you see heimongmong.” Back home, I thought about what she said… [These] were words I had never thought about in English terms. I suppose the closest in meaning may be “confused” and “dark fog”. (Tan Enmei172) Rose thinks “hulihudu” and “heimongmong” can’t be translated to English because they refer to the sensation only Chinese can have.
Another example is that June. She says, “My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meaning and I seemed to hear less than was said, while my mother heard more.”(Tan Enmei 27) June looks for meanings in what is stated and does not understand that her mother omits important information because she thinks that her daughter knows it; Suyuan, on the other hand, looks for meanings in what has not been stated and adds many things to what has been stated and comes up with meanings that surprise her daughter June.
4. Cultural Understanding and Integration Reflected in the Harmonious Mother-daughter Relationships
Although Amy Tan mainly describes the cultural clashes in the novel, her real aim is to find a balance in these cultural conflicts. An important theme of the novel is the integration of multicultural clashes. Love is the key weapon. No matter how tired the four daughters are of their mothers’ harsh requirements and constant intervention in their lives, no matter how bitter their quarrels are, these all melt in the great maternity love. What deeply rooted in the daughters’ bones is the traditional Chinese women’s humbleness, meekness, filial piety, obedience and tolerance. The hidden Chinese gene emerges when the daughters embrace, accept and finally understand Chinese culture. So multifarious differences between mothers and daughters don’t split them up but become the driving force for them to seek mutual tolerance and understanding.
4.1 The communications between mothers and daughters and changes of education style
Rose Hsu Jordan finds herself unable to persist her ideas, to protect herself or to make any decisions. Although she expresses her ideas by disobeying her mother to marry Ted, she still makes herself a slave to Ted. At home, Ted decides everything. At last, she needs her mother’s help to realize what she should do in her life. The last two groups of stories demonstrate the formationj of cultural understanding and blending.
The understanding and reconciliation between mothers and daughters are shaped day by day. In the last part of the novel, Jing-Mei and her father go to China to look for Jing-Mei’s half sisters. When they arrive in GuangDong and see her father’s aunt, she still can’t understand her mother’s words of how to rebuild Jing-Mei’s genome to let her be a Chinese again. After Jing-Mei’s father tells her Suyuan’s story after she runs away from GuiLin, she knows why her mother leaves the twins on the road. At that time, she feels she just knows so little about her mother who has gone away forever. When she sees her two sisters she realizes the Chinese quality which is hidden in her body and totally understands her mother at last.
In this multicultural novel, the author makes us understand the cultural disparity. The daughters, once think that their mothers’ Chinese cultural background is the barrier of communication. They cannot understand their mothers’ beliefs and their way of love. But when they encounter some difficulties in their life, they turn to their mother for help, and from their mothers’ stories, they finally understand their mothers. Ying-Ying begins to change herself only when she realizes that she has passed her passivity and fatalism to her daughter Lena. She sees the sadness of her daughter’s marriage, and urges her daughter to take an active position. In the story “Waiting between the Trees”, Ying-Ying says:
“Her wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into the darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything. I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I share the same body there is a part of her mind that is part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore. And now I must tell her everything about my past. It is the only way to penetrate her skin and pull her to where she can be saved.”(Tan Enmei 216)
4.2 Daughters’ understanding of and respect for their mothers
With the passage of time, with the experiences in their career, marriage, life and failure, the daughters gradually grow mature and come to realize all the high demands, blame and severe criticism from their mothers are actually a protection to them. As can be seen in the final chapters of the novel, the daughters put down their self-defense, cut off their thorns and take proactive measures to ease the tension in their mother-daughter relations. After Suyuan Woo’s death, Jin-Mei plays Schumann’s Child"s Request again, the one she deliberately screwed up at the concert. She is very surprised she could still remember the music and plays the piece without difficulty. Suyuan Woo sends the piano to Jin-Mei for her 30th birthday and tells her she is gifted for playing piano and she would be successful if she makes more efforts. Only after her mother’s death and when she plays the music again does she truly understand her mother’s good intentions. At last, Jin-Mei realizes the swam feather dream of her mother and goes to Shanghai to reunite with her half-sisters; Lena accepts her mother’s advice, bravely leaves her husband and starts a new life; Rose Hsu Jordan recognizes her own values after hearing her mother’s story and bursts out her own voice in the broken marriage; Lindo and Waverly have a heart-to-heart talk and laugh happily in the hairdressing salon.
Daughters’ understanding and reconciliation with their mothers is essentially the understanding and reconciliation between Chinese and American culture. This not only represents the integration of the two cultures but also breaks the myth of Western-oriented cultural world. Amy Tan shows us that a person can remain selective of her culture without giving up the heritage of her tradition. At the beginning of the novel, June Woo says, “My mother and I spoke two different languages… I talked to her English, she answered back in Chinese.”(Tan Enmei 20) but after her trip to China, she says: “My mother was right, I am becoming a Chinese.”(Tan Enmei239) The last part of the novel Queen Mother of the Western Skies represents the theme. The mothers are queen mothers, whose wisdom the daughters should listen to. The mothers who suffer a lot never lose hope for the daughters and their relationship with their mothers; finally, June visits her half-sisters to fulfill her mother’s wish.
5. Exploring the Methods for the Harmonious Coexistence of Chinese and American Culture
The world is a treasure house where cultures of different nations are displayed. Culture diversity is a valuable asset rather than a heavy debt nor a communication barrier to human beings. A nation’s culture tells a lot about the evolution of the nation’s understanding of the world and life, both past and present. Culture thus embodies a nation’s fundamental pursuit of mind and dictates its norms of behavior. The historical process of human development is one in which different civilizations interact with and enrich each other and all civilizations in human history have contributed to human progress in their own unique way.
5.1 To preserve and promote traditional Chinese culture
The modernization and globalization of the world have accelerated the pace of immigration. There are more and more Chinese people who put themselves into the totally new American context while leaving their homeland and being separated from the historical and cultural background. Chinese immigrants have something changed in their mind, in other words, they feel that their history is gradually fading away, especially their offspring who lose the relation to their native culture.
Culture should be treated seriously, and anything that belongs to culture can’t be discarded easily.Today, in the multi-cultural context, if the traditional Chinese culture is given up, there would be no bridge between tradition and new cultures, so only if the native culture is taken seriously and if the differences between cultures is exaggerated, the conflicts between cultures will be more intense, and then, there will be no hope of peace, common development and prosperity.
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