In The Joy Luck Club, Tan probes the problematic mother-daughter relationship in sixteen separate stories spanning two generations of eight women. Though the eight characters are divided into four families, the book itself is concerned more with an unmistakable bifurcation along generational lines: mothers, whose stories all took place in China, and daughters, whose stories deal with their lives in America. Though the mothers all have different names and individual stories, they seem interchangeable in that they all have similar personalities—strong, determined, and endowed with mysterious power, and they all show similar concerns about their daughters’ welfare. As a result, the mothers are possessively trying to hold onto their daughters, and the daughters are battling to get away from their mothers. The four mothers and four daughters are different, but their differences remain insignificant as the action of the novel is focused on the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between them.
The mothers’ inability to speak perfect American English has multiple ramifications. For one thing, as they themselves have not lived in a foreign country, the daughters are left with the false impression that their mothers are not intelligent. As a result, the daughters often feel justified in believing that their mothers having nothing worthwhile to say. Furthermore, when the mother and the daughter share neither the same realm of experience and knowledge nor the same concerns, their differences are not marked by a slip of the tongue or the lack of linguistic adroitness or even by a generational gap, but rather by a deep geographical and cultural cleft. When the mother talks about American ways, the daughter is willing to listen; when the mother shows her Chinese ways, the daughter ignores her. The mother is thus unable to teach her daughter the Chinese ways of obeying parents, of listening to the mother’s mind, of hiding her thoughts, of knowing her own worth without becoming vain and, most important of understanding why Chinese thinking is best.
The gulf between the Old World and the New, between the Chinese mother and the American daughter, is exacerbated by the ethnic and racial biases against the Chinese that the young daughter has to deal with on a regular basis. A conversation between Waverly and her mother, Lindo, shows that even as a young child, the daughter is fully aware of the hurtful effect these prejudices have had on the Chinese mother, who has not adjusted well to the life and customs of the new land. One night, while Lindo is brushing her daughter’s hair, Waverly, who has overheard a boy in her class discuss Chinese torture, wickedly asks her the following question: “Mother, what is Chinese torture?”[3] Visibly disturbed by the question, Lindo sharply nicks her daughter’s skull with a hairpin. She then softly but proudly answers hat Chinese people is proficient in many areas. They “do business, do medicine, do painting…do torture. Best torture.”[6]
Conclusion
The thesis focuses on the struggles encountered by mothers and daughters in contemporary Chinese American contexts. Each constructs a representation of the ordinary activities and dilemmas of living in an American culture, and examines the complex negotiations that Chinese immigrant mothers and their Americanized daughters perform daily in dealing with diverse, and often conflicting in interpretive systems and cultures. This borderland existence, as Gloria Anzaldua tells us, can lead to un choque: “Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing images. The coming together of two self-consistence but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision”[11].
Tan writes about family issues, she extends family conflicts to cultural ones. Tan puts her own experience in the context of all Chinese Americans, so her novels have more symbolic meanings with deeper cultural connotation. Through the continuity and development in the mother-daughter relationship of two generations, the themes get repeated representation and revelation. The clashes and the urgency to leap over them are also brought out and intensified by cultural difference. These conflicts lead to the necessary cultural journey of Jing-mei Woo to China, which provides a feasible solution for the problems that Chinese and other ethnic Americans are facing---active participation in the cultural strive for openness and invitation for understanding of other cultures.
The Chinese immigrant mothers in The Joy Luck Club were born and grew up in China and Chinese culture is deeply rooted in their mind. In contrast, their daughters were born and brought up in America. They are deeply influenced by American culture. As what has been suggested at the beginning of this thesis, the cultural collision is then well reflected in the mother-daughter relationship in this novel. As an American-born writer of Chinese immigrant, Tan lively performs the process of different cultures colliding with each other by describing the relationship among people. It helps to make this novel better understood through analyzing the cultural connotation of the mother-daughter relationship; meanwhile, it may develop the understanding to the life of Chinese immigrants in American society and their bicultural identity in American mainstream culture.
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