《喜福会》中母女关系反映的文化碰撞(英文)

Abstract: The Joy Luck Club is the first novel of Amy Tan, who is one of the most significant contemporary Chinese American women writers. The novel deals with mother-daughter relationship, and conflicts between two generations that are precipitated by cultural as well as age gaps. This thesis attempts to analyze the Chinese and American cultural collision in The Joy Luck Club, by providing an overview of cultural collision reflected in mother-daughter relationship in the novel.

Key words: Mother-daughter relationship; Culture collision; Conflicts

摘 要：《喜福会》是当代著名美国华裔女作家谭恩美的处女作。作品描写母女关系，以及两代人因为文化和年龄的差距而导致的冲突。本文通过对《喜福会》中母女关系体现的文化碰撞加以叙述于概括，分析由此所折射出的中美文化冲突。

关键词：母女关系；文化碰撞; 冲突

Introduction
Amy Tan, the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, is one of the most significant contemporary Asian American women writers. Her novels have received both critical and popular success, and she is among the first women writers to bring Asian American culture and experiences to a broad mainstream audience. Tan’s works, which focus on Chinese who have immigrated to the United States, illustrate the difficulties of maintaining a dual cultural identity. Many of the struggles and conflicts her characters experience, however, transcend cultural differences. Her novels also provide a feminist view of ethnic Americans: “frequently, her characters overcome obstacles that face them as minority women in racist and sexist societies.”[1] Tan’s works also deal with familial bonds, usually mother-daughter relationships, and conflicts between the generations that are precipitated by cultural as well as age gaps. Although her fiction is not strictly autobiographical, many of the situations and themes spring from incidents in her life; others are based on anecdotes she heard from relatives. Tan’s novels blend the contemporary concerns of uneasily assimilated Chinese Americans with stories about China by Chinese women. Tan’s comprehensive perspective engages bicultural issues on a number of different levels, but the dislocations of living in two cultures lie at the heart of Tan’s fiction.

1  Mother-daughter’s conflicts presented in The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club consists of four sections including sixteen stories narrated by seven characters. Every mother or daughter has two stories expect Suyuan (Jing-mei Woo’s mother); her stories are narrated by Jing-mei. So Jing-mei has four stories. In the mothers’ stories they tell about their unhappy marriages, the failures of their dreams, their survival in hard surroundings, their resistances to cruel realities and miserable war life they suffered in old China; they also tell about their hopes and dreams, which they think can change their life, to come to America. In the daughters’ stories, they tell about their conflicts with their immigrant mothers, their puzzlement in marriages, life and work. But the dominant theme going through most of the stories is the conflicts between the mothers and their daughters, which take place between every pair of mother and daughter, only some are severe, some seeming trivial, some obvious, and some implicit.
1.1 Mother-daughter relationship in The Joy Luck Club
The mother-daughter relationship is a central theme in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. There are four central pairs of mothers and daughters: Suyuan Woo and Jing-mei Woo, An-mei Hsu and Rose Hsu Jordan, Lindo Jong and Waverly Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair and Lena St. Clair. The mothers are all Chinese immigrant women who entered the United States after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 while the daughters are fully assimilated American-born Chinese. The stories of these pairs are interwoven in four major segments with mothers and daughters telling their stories of how thy came to be where they are in life. Each of the four major segments opens with a vignette, which is then followed by four chapters. In the first and last segments mothers tell their individual stories and these mother segments figuratively embrace the two middle segments in which their daughters speaks as second-generation Chinese women in the United States.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net