Tan’s shrewd ear for dialogue captures the linguistic differences well. The mothers’ English is undoubtedly imperfect. Subjects, articles, and prepositions are often missing verbs often do not agree with nouns. After, for instance, Waverly becomes angry at Lindo Jong for bragging about her at the marketplace, Lindo says: “So shame be with mother? …Embarrass you be my daughter?”[3] Waverly desperately tries to explain, “That’s not what I mean. That’s not what I say”.[3] Lindo persists,” What you say?”[3] Furthermore communication at the point is impossible. The mother and the daughter do not talk to each other for several days after the incident. In another example, Ying-ying St. Clair’s uneasiness with the American way of life manifests itself in the way she pronounces the profession of her daughter and son-in-law: “It is an ugly word. Arty-tacky.”[3] Similarly, An-mei Hsu cannot pronounce psychiatrist correctly: “Why can you talk about this with a psyche-iatric and not with mother?”[3]
2.2.4 The influence of Chinese culture on American culture
Despite linguistic and cultural differences, the mothers are eventually able to help their daughters embrace their racial identity. Before Jing-mei’s trip to China, she denies her Chinese heritage. She remembers Suyuan Woo telling her, once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese. Whenever her mother says this, Jing-mei sees herself transforming like a werewolf. But after Suyuan’s death, the rest of the mothers insist that Jing-mei visit her half sisters in China. It is during this visit that Jing-mei comes to terms with her true identity: “My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese.”[8] Moreover, Jing-mei has become her mother by taking over her mother’s place at the mahjong table, on the East side of the table, where things begin. Her trip to China culminates in her realization that both her mother and China are in her blood.
With a new consciousness, the mature daughter sees her mother in a new light. As Waverly Jong puts it, “In the brief instant I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a work for her armor, a knitting needle for her word, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in”.[3] The daughter’s defiance turns out to be baseless, and the scheming ways of the mother who seemed relentless in her pursuit of her daughter’s weakest spots prove to be unfounded. After her mother’s death, Jing-mei Woo also realizes, for the first time, that Schumann’s music, which as a child she had played at a fateful recital, is in fact, composed of two parts: Pleading Child and Perfectly Contented. Interestingly, it is the former poise that she placed so poorly. While in mourning for her mother: Jing-mei also comes to the realization that she has always been biased by a one-sided view of life and by a poor opinion for her mother. When she plays the two pieces of music together, she suddenly understands that they are two halves of the same song. Schumann’s music thus serves as a metaphor used by Tan to highlight the relationship between mother and daughter. “This relationship encompasses, like Schumann’s music, two phases of the human experience”. [10] At times, these phases may appear to be contradictory, but, in fact, they are really two natural and complementary stages of life. Tan thus seems to imply that a complete and holistic experience of life requires an understanding and acceptance of both phases.
3 The cultural collision
In The Joy Luck Club, the stories of the four pairs of mothers and daughters convey a sense of the cultural barriers and strong emotional ties that exist between the two generations—the mothers and daughters struggle with the opposing values of Asian tradition and American modernity.
Tan uses the contrast between the mothers’ and daughters’ beliefs and values to show the difficulties first-generation immigrants face in transmitting their native culture to their offspring. Ultimately, Tan endorses the mothers’ traditional Chinese worldview because it offers the possibility of choice and action in a world where paralysis is frequently a threat. However, readers who are not specialists in Chinese cosmology share the same problematic relation to the text as the daughters do to their mothers’ native culture: they cannot always accurately translate meaning where the context is implied but not stated. Bits of traditional lore crop up in nearly every story, but divorced from a broader cultural context, they are likely to be seen as mere brushstrokes of local or authentic detail. Readers may be tempted to accept at face value the daughter’s pronouncements that their mothers’ beliefs are no mire than superstitious nonsense. To ensure that readers do not hear less than what Tan is actually saying about the mothers’ belief systems and their identities, references to Chinese cosmology in the require explication and elaboration.
The main focus of the book is on the ties between the mothers and the daughters, blending the lives of China-born women and their customs and traditions with those of their American-born daughters. With all their differences, both generations must struggle to overcome their inborn passivity. The four mothers of The Joy Luck Club feel that they can enrich the lives of their daughters by sharing the secrets of their past.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
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