As immigrants, the mothers struggle with culture shock rather than with the issues of dual identity that challenge their daughters. At the immigration station, Ying-ying’s husband, who loves her almost obsessively and speaks for her instead of allowing her to express herself, renames her Betty St. Clair, further obscuring her identity. Ying-ying feels the loss deeply and renews her ancient Chinese customs by invoking help from Chinese deities and soothsayer. An-mei is, however, unable to translate the Chinese dates into American ones. Lindo is also unable to translate dates when she wants to choose the right day to immigrate to San Francisco. This inability to translate dates points symbolically to the loss of a sense of time and place that women experience on abruptly leaving one culture and entering another.
The frustration that Waverly’s mother Lindo Jong feels is shared by all the mothers. This frustration is best summarized in her painful and poignant confession during the course of which she accuses herself of being responsible for the way Waverly has turned out. “Her sense of responsibility stems from the fact she is the one who wanted Waverly to have the best of both worlds, and it leads her to openly berate herself for not being able to foresee that her daughter’s American circumstances would not necessarily mix well with her Chinese reality.”[5] Lindo’s perspective is informed by her personal history and by her ability to bridge time and cultures. At the same time, Lindo’s knowledge of family history provides one key to her sense of ethic identity.
2.1.4 Mothers’ expectations and views on their daughters
The four women who have consoled themselves in America for 40 years with friendship, mahjong and stories, have already lived lives that are, again, unimaginable. On top of all their other terrors and adversities, their pasts have been lost; as if these horrors have taken place not just in another country but on another planet. Their deepest wish is to pass their knowledge, their tales, on to their children, especially to their daughters, but those young women are undergoing a slow death of their own; drowning in American culture at the same time they starve for a past they can never fully understand.
The first-generation immigrant women not only maintain a cultural connection with China and a psychological perseverance of unified self for themselves, but also use their painful China experiences as ethnic heritage to educate the younger American-born generation to “penetrate my daughter’s tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose.”[3]
Chinese parents want Americanized children but expect them to think like Chinese. For the immigrant parents, educating their American-born children to speak the family language is a way to continue the cultural tradition and to instill ethnic pride. Speaking a private language is also an attempt to mark one’s difference from the mainstream culture and to resist racism, hegemony, and the overwhelming power of homogenization in this society. “In Tan’s storytelling, speaking Chinese also becomes simply functional for the older immigrants who do not want to participate or not perceived as full participants in the public language.”[6] As a result, they remain outsiders within the system; their use of private language marks the central feature of their identity.
2.2 American culture center
America is an immigrant country with a lot of immigrants from different places of the world. But at the very beginning it was mainly made up of European whites, therefore, the European whites’ culture became the dominant culture. This state hasn’t been changed much all these years. In America the whites, especially those with European heritage, control and dominate the major institutions, determine the flow and content of information, so the history, politics, economics and culture are all marked deeply with the characteristics of European whites, whose race’s superiority comes into being gradually.
Therefore, conflicts between different races take place frequently. The conflicts between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club are usually caused by the opinion of the American culture center. First, the daughters insist on their own American values; second, the government’s policies deepen the daughters’ prejudice to the mothers and made the daughters despise and refuse the mothers’ culture.
2.2.1 Daughters’ American culture background
The daughters enjoy great opportunities in terms of education, career, and general social success in Western culture.
The daughters, on the other hand, want to assimilate into mainstream America; sometimes they try to look more American to escape racist taunts. The daughters’ struggles with their dual cultural identities frequently take from the form of an inability to communicate with their mothers. June’s mother often failed to answer her questions directly and sometimes gave her answers that were foolish superstitutions: “these kinds of explanations made me feel my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did” [3]. She talked to her mother in English and was answered in Chinese, but the lack of communication transcended linguistic barriers—June acknowledges that she and Suyuan “never really understood one another. We translate each other’s meaning and I seem to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.”[3] Ying-ying corrects Lindo for addressing June by her Chinese name, explaining that “They all go by their American names.”[3] As the daughters mature, however, they learn through the teaching and example of their mothers to appreciate their Chinese heritage.
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：