Tan depicts a variety of mother-daughter bonds rather than focusing like Kingston on a single primary mother-daughter relationship. As Tan says in a Booklist interview with Donna Seaman, “And when you talk to 100 different people to get their stories on a situation, that’s what the truth is. So it’s really a multiple stories.”[2] In analyzing the representations of mother-daughter relationship in her stories, it became clear that the interactions between mothers and daughters are complicated by broader circumstances within and between China and the United States. The relationship is not to be understood as personal stories or psychological dramas simply to be worked out within and between Chinese immigrant mothers and second-generation Chinese American daughters. Rather, these mothers and daughters are precariously and ambiguously positioned in different geopolitical locations, languages generations and histories, thus, their ability to interact with each other and with their diverse communities is seriously affected.
1.2 Conflicts between the mothers and daughters
The most serious conflicts between the mothers and daughters should be that of Suyuan Woo and her daughter Jing-mei Woo. As a child, Jing-mei sets herself against her mother’s any hopes for her and disappoints her mother as possible as she could. She makes her mother give up any efforts to foster her to be a prodigy. Still, her mother’s disappointment follows her into adulthood. She has never been a straight-A student. She does not attend Stanford University, and she drops out of school without earning her bachelor degree. Now that Suyuan has gone, Jing-mei no longer has a chance to win her mother’s approval or to live up to her mother’s expectations. Worse than that, she has never developed the courage to talk with her mother about her own need to decide on a course of action for herself, and she has never asked Suyuan why her ambitions for her daughter are so grand that Jing-mei can never be successful. In her late thirties, Jing-mei continues to be paralyzed by tremendous doubts about her abilities; she is insecure of her worth as a person.
There are many conflicts and misunderstanding between Lindo and Warerly. Waverly always regards her mother (Lindo) as her opponent, who plays games with her but knows more tricks than she has thought. She says, “My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself permanently in my memory.”[3]
Although the conflict between An-mei and Rose are not as many as those between Suyuan Woo and Jingmei Woo, we can also find some between this pair of mother and daughter. Rose marries a Caucasian Ted, whom her mother regards as A Waigoren (an American). When she is baffled by her marriage problem, Rose firstly goes to talk about her marriage problem to many people, such as her friends, her psychiatrist, everybody it seems, expect her mother. Born and brought up in America, Rose inevitably holds a prejudice against her mother and the Chinese culture. Naturally, she always believes that American cultures are superior to Chinese culture and American version is always better. In her eyes, her mother symbolizes backwardness and ignorance. So when Rose comes up to her marriage problem, she would rather go to see a psychiatrist firstly than consult with her mother.
Ying-ying and Lena is another pair of mother and daughter in The Joy Luck Club. There are also some conflicts and misunderstanding between them. Ying-ying once sighs, “When she (Lena) was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore.”[3] Although Ying-ying thinks of herself and her daughter as having shared the same body, as being of the same flesh, she also sees Lena as having sprung away like a dipper fish that exists on a distant shore. Obviously, the mother and her daughter are separated from each other from the time when Lena was born and inevitably there is a great gap between them.
2 Causes of the cultural collision
Tan found an untapped audience for stories of Chinese American mothers and daughters. In the novel, the American-born daughters know very little about their mothers. All their lives they have tried hard to assimilate into mainstream America, which Chinese are at best avoided, at worst shameful. By ignoring their mothers’ effort to insulate Chinese tradition into them, the daughters have frustrated the hopes of the mothers that their daughters would maintain their Chinese characters under American circumstances. The price the daughters pay for their seemingly successful assimilation is “their nagging sense of unease in the identities that they have laboriously created for themselves.”[4] On the other hand, the mothers never give up their hope of imparting their Chinese characters and wisdom to their daughters, something that is often perceived by their children as manipulation and control. The consequence is a complete breakdown of communication between the mothers and daughters. The disparity between parents’ hopes and children’s failures brings tension.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
共9页: 上一页 [1] 2 [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] 下一页
网摘收藏:
当前位置:
载入中...
-> 在百度中搜索：
-> 在Google中搜索：