2.2.2Mutual influence of the two different cultures on the daughter
The need to ethicize their experience and to establish an identity is more real and more perplexing to the daughters than to the mothers, who, after all, are intimate with and secure in their Chinese cultural identity in an experiential sense, in a way their American-born daughters can never be. The daughters, unlike their mothers, are the American not by choice, but by birth. Neither the Chinese nor the American culture is equipped to define them expect in rather superficial terms. They can identity themselves for sure neither as Chinese nor American. Even when they feel their identity of “American ness”[3] is an estrangement from their mothers’ past, there is no means of recovering the Chinese innocence, of returning to a state which their experiential existence has never allowed them. They are Chinese-Americans whose Chinese ness is more meaningful in their relationship to white Americans than in their relationship to the Chinese culture they know little about. “The return to their ethnic identity on the part of the daughters is represented in The Joy Luck Club as realizable on a level where a real split between the existential self and the ethnic self is alluded to by a narrative rivalry between ‘tale of the past’ and ‘tale of the present.’”[7] Not only are the contrast and discontinuity between the two types of tales metaphorical of the split of self, but also their organizing narrator, Jing-mei, is symbolic of the split self of the daughters’ generation. The daughters’ battles for autonomy and independence from powerful imposing mothers are relentless, and the confrontations between mothers and daughters are fiancé. In the chapter “Without Wood”[3], daughter Rose Hsu Jordan describes the decision she made as a child in her dream to pick a different doll from the one her mother expected her to choose. Another daughter, Jing-mei Woo, adopts a self-defensive struggle against her mother’s expectation that she be a child prodigy by disappointing her whenever she can. She does this by getting average grades, by not becoming class president, by not being accepted into Stanford University, and finally by dropping out of college. By consistently failing her mother, Jing-mei managers to assert her own will.
Realizing that sharing her past with her daughter might be the last and only trump card she has in order to save her daughter; Ying-ying St. Clair decides to give it a try. Her decision, nevertheless, reflects her awareness of the nature of the clash—the daughter’s lack of ethnic and cultural identity which Ying-ying is convinced will lead to her daughter’s unhappiness. By telling her past to a daughter who has spent all of her life trying to slip away from her, Ying-ying hopes to reclaim her: “to penetrate her skin and pull her to where she can be saved.”[3] Jing-mei Woo’s dying mother also realizes that her daughter’s problem similarly stems from her refusal to embrace her Chinese roots. Indeed, before her trip to China, Jing-mei relentlessly denies her Chinese heritage. On the train to China from Hong Kong, Jing-mei finally comes to terms with her true identity. Reflecting on her past, she admits to feeling different. Furthermore, she is now prepared to concede: “My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese.”[8]
The daughters experience themselves socially as a recognizable ethnic minority and want to eradicate the sense of difference they feel among their peers. They endeavor to dissociate themselves from their mothers’ broken English and Chinese mannerisms, and they reject as nonsense the fragments of traditional lore their mothers try to pass along to them. However, cut adrift from any spiritual moorings, the younger women are overwhelmed by the number of choices that their materialistic culture offers and are insecure about their successful American career woman. When it dawns on Jing-mei that the aunties see that “joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, and that to these closed American-born minds ‘joy luck’ is not a word, it does not exist”,[3] she realized that there is a profound difference in how the two generations understand fate, hope, and personal responsibility. Devoid of a worldview that endows reality with unified meaning the daughters “will bear grandchildren born without any connection hope passed from generation to generation.”[3]
2.2.3 American cultural doubts in Chinese culture
The daughters, born and raised in the United States, have assimilated and acculturated into the American scene. They desire to learn and speak only the dominant language and they valorize elite Eurocentric perspective and aesthetics above all others; they participate in the conscious or unconscious appropriation of Orient list or imperialist views of their own ethnic community. For them, their Chinese mother become disturbingly intimate and embodies reminders of what they do not want to be in America.
The mother’s wish for the daughter to live a better life than the one she had back in China is revealed in the conversation between the Chinese woman and her swan on her journey to America in the novel’s first prologue. “Ironically, this wish becomes the very source of the conflicts and tensions in their relationship.”[3] This is made perfectly clear by Jing-mei Woo when she half-jokingly, half-remorsefully recalls her ever-agonizing childhood, a period during which her mother unsuccessfully attempts to transform her into a child prodigy. At first her mother tries to cultivate some hidden genius in Jing-mei in order to prepare her for a future that she hopes will be brilliant. When one of the women dies, her daughter, Jing-mei Woo is drafted to sit in for her at the game. But she feels uncomfortably out of place in this unassimilated environment among older women who still wear funny Chinese dresses with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches of embroidered silk sewn over their breasts, and who meet in one another’s houses, where too many once fragrant smells from Chinese cooking have been compressed onto a thin layer of invisible grease. The all-to-Chinese ritual of the joy luck club has always impressed her as little more than a shameful Chinese custom: “like the secret gathering of the Ku Klux Klan or the tom-tom dances of TV Indians preparing for war”.[3]
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