Cultural Interpretation of Mother-Daughter Relationship in The Joy Luck Club.doc

Cultural Interpretation of Mother-Daughter Relationship in The Joy Luck Club. IntroductionA. Introduction to Amy TanAmy Ruth Tan was born in Oakland, California, on February 19, 1952. Her parents-John Tan, an electrical engineer, and Daisy Tan, a vocational nurse-had left China to settle in the United States in 1949. Amy Tan grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her father and one of her brothers died of brain tumors when she was fourteen. This sad experience left a shadow long upon her sensitive heart. In 1968 her mother took her and the other surviving brother to Switzerland, where amid much emotional difficulty resulted from the death of her family members and improper adaptation within the new environment, she finished high school in Monteux, Switzerland. The family returned to California in the following year. Amy Tan was educated at San Jose State University, obtaining a B.A. in English and linguistics in 1973, and an M.A. in linguistics in 1974. She also did postgraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley from 1974 to 1976. In1974, she married Louis DeMattei, an attorney. According to the jacket copy of The Joy Luck Club (1989), “Though her parents anticipated she would become a neurosurgeon by trade and a concert pianist by hobby, she instead becomes a consultant to programs for disabled children, and later a free-lance writer” (Sacvan 26). She worked as consultant to the Alameda Country Association for the mentally editor and associate publisher for Emergency Room Reports from 1981 to 1983. She then freelanced as a technical writer for the next four years.Given by her accidental entry and late start as an author of fiction, it is remarkable that only a few years after these experiences she published what immediately became one of the most popular and acclaimed novels of recent times, The Joy Luck Club, which started a good beginning for her literary life. Now her work has been translated into twenty languages. At present, she is living with her husband in San Francisco and New York with their cat-Sagwa, and their dog-Mr.Zo. Her first book, The Joy Luck Club, won the Bay Area Book Reviewers award for the best of fiction and the American Library Association award for the best book for young adults, and a nominee for the prestigious Nation Book Critics Circle award. She also won the National Book Award and the L.A. Times Book Award in 1989. It became a bestseller, and in 1993 it was made, from a screenplay co-written by Tan, into a big-budge, heavily promoted Hollywood film.Tans second novel, The Kitchen Gods Wife (1991), explores similar themes of cultural clash and of a daughters growing understanding of and respect for her mother. This book also received warm welcome. Some reviewers even maintain that it is superior to its predecessor.Her third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses (1993), dramatizes the two conflicting cultures in a relationship of half-sisters, one from China and the other-the American child of an American mother and a Chinese father. The response to this book was more mixed than those with her earlier works. A number of reviewers felt much dubious at the novels assertion of the reality of reincarnation and of a world of the spirits.She has also written two attractive books for children, The Moon Lady and the Chinese Siamese Cat. Her new book, The Bonesetters Daughter, was published by Putnam in early 2001.To have won amazing reputation by the first book and seemingly become a literary star overnight, Amy Tan felt the necessity to be more careful in writing the books thereafter. “Each of my books, I determined, would succeed its predecessor, increasing in scope, intelligence of form and thus critical attendance, perhaps even readership” (Tan 586).Amy Tan is highly praised for her superb storytelling skills and employment of the English language. In a vivid and fluid style, she interweaves the clashes between two cultures, two languages and two generations (in her two former books) with humor, Chinese folklore, fairy-tales, horoscopes etc. and narrates wonderful stories shuttling between the past and the present, fiction and nonfiction, east and west. Lyric and beautiful as her style is, Tan also succeeds in preventing the emotions falling into sentimentality. Her stories are extraordinarily enchanting, though some readers may be clear-headed enough to doubt the convincibility of the end of her books, such as in the Joy Luck Club.B. Introduction to the Joy Luck ClubAmy Tans The Joy Luck Club is a loosely connected series of stories about Chinese-American mothers and daughters. The Joy Luck Club, founded in 1949, is comprised of four young Chinese women whose families have settled in San Francisco and who meet regularly to have dinner, to play mahjong and, by sharing their stories, to keep contract with the lives and the beliefs that they have left behind on the other side of the world.When one of the four women, Suyuan, dies suddenly, her thoroughly Americanized young daughter is persuaded to take her place in the club and ultimately journey to China to meet her family there, including her twin sisters from an earlier marriage, whom Suyuan was forced to abandon many years before in the chaos of a mass flight from the advancing Japanese army.The separate story sections are divided into four parts, each with mother figures telling two stories, mostly concerning with their past in per-1949 China, and their daughter telling two stories, one about growing up and one about a current family situation. The exception to this pattern is Jing-mei, the daughter of the founder of The Joy Luck Club, who narrates a story in each of the four sections and who adds additional continuity by narrating the first and last section. All the stories inside the novel can be read as separate ones and the people seldom contact with each other outside the family group, though they all know each other. All separate sections are monologue of the mothers or the daughters. The belief and life style of both generations and the attitude of each part towards the other are therefore manifested most clearly. Readers are privileges to understand the stance of both the mother and daughters, and realize the existence of the communication barrier, which has not spoken out between the two generations. Most are also convinced of the possibility of a happy end (for the family, and symbolically, for multicultural perspective of cultures with different power in the global stage), though Tans management of the process in which the daughter moved from indifferent at her mothers Chinese peculiarities to understanding of her strength of three daughter crying out “mama” together in China. Tan not only invites the reader to share heartfelt sorrow and grief, to acknowledge human imperfection and fates ambiguities, but also shows us that a life can encompass all and still add up to triumph of the spirit to endure, to show compassion, and to hold fast to dreams.After almost 25 years since the first famous Chinese-American work by Maxine Hong Kingston was written (which is now the most frequently taught book by an alive writer and enters the mainstream canon in the USA), The Joy Luck Club arouses readers interest in Chinese-American literature much stronger than the works intervening. Amy Tan and Kingston, or The Joy Luck Club and Woman Warrior are necessary to be mentioned as long as the topic is about Chinese-American literature, and even Asian American literature. Cultural Encounter between the East and the WestA. Family as the Source for Cultural Development1. The Importance of Family for CultureHuman beings are not only the carrier of cultural tradition and reproduction, but also the subject and even the creator of certain culture. Cultural tradition is itself the organic system of all the cultural elements produced out of the characteristics in different forms by the human beings, which are still on the road of evolution. The person who has internalized certain culture within himself/herself has acquired the social quality, and what necessary for the survival as a human being within the society. Family as the basic unit of society has always been an inseparable part of culture. In transferring a new-born baby into a socialized human being, family has been playing a most important role.Family is the basic unit to carry on cultural forms-since culture illustrates the life style of the people in a certain community and externalizes the essence of human beings-through the younger generation learning from the older generation about the ways of affectation, behavior and evaluation within the society. At the same time, family, the kindergarten for fundamental education of the young, also shapes individuals with its own unique style and quality besides the general cultural influence, so as to create a distinctive culture of a certain ethnic and race, with shared spiritual state, life style and psychological quality, and also differences between the individuals.Family provides the environment of community, affection, parents responsibility for the children, and coincidentally, childrens strong reliance on the parents. Thus family plays a decisive role in the adaptation of social standards and cultural norms by generations.To summarize, family is the cradle for the human culture in the sense of tradition-handing-on, education (including knowledge, ethics, religion, norms) and preparations for social participation.2. Familys Role in the NovelCentered on the mother-daughter relationship, The Joy Luck Club never goes away from the family issues. Family with the clashes between the mothers and daughters becomes a symbolic site for the conflict between the cultures they represented, and finally the birthplace for Chinese-American culture.The novel takes a close-up upon each family member and their psychological and cultural journey they had taken from the old Chinese family, the immigrant family to the modern American family. As the original place for different cultures that different cultural identities present, family becomes the focus of the generational gap, cultural conflicts and language mistranslation. Family, in which disharmony appears, intensifies the conflict, and suddenly hears a pause for everything because of the death of Suyuan, and finally leads the women in the book to dissolve the contradiction and save the loss of meaning that the mothers had once intended to express.3. The Concept of “Family” from China to USAIn the novel, the daughters of the older generation(the future mothers of the American-born daughters) can easily decide to get back home no matter what humiliation or hardship they would face, while the daughters of the younger generation are always in search of a way to free themselves from their family and thus from “the control” of the mothers. Society as the Source of Cultural Resistance Besides the fundamental cultural education within the family, society offers the time and space to mold and melt individual cultural attitude, through its immensely influential power of public tendency and mass media etc. With the combination of religion, public attitude, education and political status of different classes and ethnic groups in society, the mother-daughter relationship goes far beyond generational gap and contains cultural conflicts, and is expected to move from confrontation to reconciliation and communication on the base of mutual understanding and comprehension. As Amy Tans work imply, there is the possibility and tendency for the healing of the cultural difference and gap, though such a prospect still waits for further effort. . Conflicts of Four Pairs of Mothers and Four DaughtersA. Suyuan and Jing-meiAs a child, Jing-mei sets herself against her mothers any hope for her and disappoints her as possible as she could. She makes her mother give up any efforts to foster her to be a prodigy. Still, her mothers 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 mothers approval or to live up to her mothers expectation. 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 ambition 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 doubt about her abilities; she is insecure of her worth as a person.B. Lindo and WaverlyThere are many conflicts and misunderstanding between Lindo and Waverly. Waverly always regards her mother (Lindo) as her opponent. Waverly plays games with her mother but knows more tricks than her mother has thought. Lindo says, “My daughter knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself permanently in my memory” (Cheng ,45).C: An-mei and RoseAlthough the conflicts between An-mei and Rose are not as many as those between Lindo and Waverly, we can also find some between this pair of mother and daughter. Rose marries a Caucasian Ted, whom her mother regards as 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 best friends, her psychiatrist, everybody it seems, except 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 culture is superior to Chinese culture and America version is always better. In her eyes, her mother symbolizes backwardness and ignorance. So Rose always comes up to see a psychiatrist firstly than consultant with her mother.D. Ying-ying and LenaYing-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 sights, “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” (Long, 36). Although Ying-ying thinks 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 slippery fish that exists on a distant shore. Obviously, the mother and the daughter are separated from each other from the time when Lena was born and inevitable there is a great gap between them. The clashes between two cultures are best reflected in this novel. Despite this early lifechanging decision of moving to America, the mothers in the Joy Luck Club continues to cling