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从《喜福会》透视中美文化冲突与融合美文学

2013-05-02 18:09

Abstract
The Joy Luck Club is the first novel of Amy Tan，a famous Chinese-American writer. In the novel she mainly describes the relationship between the Joy Luck Club mothers and their daughters and cultural conflicts. The novel is set in the age of globalization and in the multicultural American society; it represents the process of misunderstanding, conflicts, understanding and blending between the mothers and the daughters. Globalization not only brings many chances to china but also brings cultural challenges to China. As the degree of globalization is getting deeper, Chinese culture faces the danger of being integrated and changed by other cultures. Through contextual analysis of the Joy Luck Club and the cultural conflicts and blending embodied in it, this paper demonstrates that in the age of globalization a balance should be kept among different cultures, and a right attitude towards cultural conflicts should be taken, and it suggests that the native culture should not be thrown away when learning from others, and instead, it should be transmitted to others.
Key Words
The Joy Luck Club; conflict; understanding; cultural blending

摘　要
《喜福会》是著名美国籍华裔女作家谭恩美的处女作，作者在小说中主要描述了四对移民母女的关系和她们之间由于文化的差异而引起的冲突，小说以全球化时代和美国多元文化社会为背景，呈现了4对母女由误会，冲突到理解的过程。在全球化环境下面临很多的机遇，但更多的是文化的挑战。随着全球化的加剧，中国文化面临一种被融化，被改变的危险。本文通过对《喜福会》文本及其所透视出的文化冲突与融合的分析，说明在全球化环境中，应该在不同文化中找到一个平衡点，并以正确的态度来对待文化冲突，同时不要轻易否定母文化，在向全世界学习其他优秀文化的时候，也要向他们传播中国传统文化。
关键词
《喜福会》；冲突；理解；文化融合

 
Introduction
In the novel The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan explores the relationship between mothers and daughters. There are 4 mother-daughter pairs in the novel, mothers are the first generation immigrants, and the daughters are born in America. The Joy Luck Club mothers come from the Chinese traditional families when the dictatorial Chinese power is destroyed by the Japanese insurgents in the 1940s. They escape from the political upheaval of China, but they don't forget their Chinese traditional culture, while their daughters are born in America, they are the second generation immigrants, and they don't understand their mothers' Chinese culture, and their way of thinking, so there are often misunderstandings between the mothers and the daughters. In order to make their daughters know them and the Chinese culture, the Joy Luck Club mothers have made pain- taking efforts to remove their differences. They seize every opportunity to tell their daughters their past experiences, demonstrate their courage to challenge the feudal society and never stop extending maternal love to their daughters. Thanks to their great efforts, their daughters gradually understand them and the Chinese culture. Therefore, cultural understanding and blending between the mothers and daughters are achieved.
In the context of globalization, China faces many chances to develop its economic power; meanwhile it faces more challenges to its traditional culture. With the development of China's economic power, China plays a more important role in the world. The communication with other countries and areas whose cultural backgrounds are totally different from China's is increasing rapidly. This paper, through the exploration of The Joy Luck Club, mainly discusses the cultural conflicts, understanding and integration between the mothers and the daughters, and metaphorically between Chinese culture and American culture. 
I．Amy Tan and Her Novel The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California. Both of her parents were Chinese immigrants. Her father, John Tan, was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister. In China, her mother Daisy had divorced an abusive husband but lost custody of her three daughters. She was forced to leave them behind when she escaped on the last boat to leave Shanghai in 1949. Her marriage to John Tan produced three children, Amy and her two brothers. Amy Tan’s family is a typical immigrant family, her parents are the first generation immigrants, and she is the second-generation immigrant. （科教作文网http://zw.ΝsΕec.cN编辑）
    She has experienced the same kind of conflicts which she portrayed in the novel. She and her mother were in constant conflict when she finished the high school in Switzerland. She and her mother didn’t speak for six moths after Amy Tan left the Baptist College her mother chose for her to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College. Tan further defied her mother by abandoning the pre-med course her mother had urged her to pursue the study of English and linguistics.
In the novel, Jing-Mei abandoned studying piano her mother hoped her to study, because she was allergic to her mother’s arrangement for her. Amy Tan and the daughters in the novel have something in common. They are the second-generation immigrants. But the mothers, as the first generation immigrants, they don’t totally integrate in the American culture. They cannot speak English with fluency. They never discard the tradition and never forget their lives in China.
 
They show their love for their daughters by planning the daughters’ future and interfering in their activities. To the mothers, they have the compulsory and responsibility to train their daughters to become perfect persons. They want to make their daughters combine the “American Context” with “Chinese Personality” perfectly. Their daughters, however, are often born and grow up in America, and are deeply affected by the American moral standard and acting principles. They cherish their independent spirits and characters, and they are not willing to be interfered and controlled by others. Their narratives justify the puzzle, and the conflicts between two generations they face, when they span the different cultures. They view their mothers as the fossils of the old society, because they fear and hate their mothers’ interference and negation on their activities. When their mothers tell their stories in China they express their detestation on it, when their mothers want to pass their Chinese cultural tradition to them, they are against it firmly. With the clash of different cultures, the two generations have difficulties in communicating and understanding each other.

大学排名

    But the novel doesn’t end with the conflicts; instead, in the process of growing up they understand their mothers’ love and the cultural reasons of the conflicts between themselves and their mothers in a deeper level. Therefore, at the end of the novel, the reconciliation between mothers and daughters forms naturally. Jing-Mei takes her mother’s place to travel back to China which proves the understanding between the two generations.
When Amy Tan embarked on her new career her mother was ill, she promised herself that if her mother recovered, she would take her mother to China, to see the daughters who have been left behind almost forty years ago, Mrs. Tan recovered and they departed for China in 1987. The trip was a revelation for Tan, and it gave her a new perspective of her often-difficult relationship with her mother.
 
Ⅱ. The Conflicts Between American and Chinese Cultures
 Embodied in the Novel
The Joy Luck Club presents many conflicts in the mother-daughter relationship. The conflicts are embodied in 3 aspects. First, the mothers and thedaughters are in different cultural backgrounds, and the daughters cannot understand their mothers. At the beginning, Jing-Mei fears that she cannot tell her mother’s story to her half-sisters, which, in fact, reflects the fear of other daughters of the Joy Luck Club members. They have identified themselves with Americans.  Jing-Mei’s fear also reflects the mothers’ common feelings. They offer the chance to go to America to their daughters, and make them self-sufficient; they wonder whether they have their daughters away from tradition. So in the story “The Joy Luck Club” Jing-Mei feels puzzled,“What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything.”(Tan 26)The way in which the mothers express their love cannot be accepted by the daughters. Jing-Mei believes that her mother’s constant blame is the embodiment of lacking of affection. However, in fact, the mother’s severity and high expectations are expressions of love and faith in her daughter. Other mother-daughter pairs experience the same misunderstanding. In some ways, this misunderstanding comes from cultural differences. The Chinese traditional concepts such as filial obedience, criticism-enveloped expression of love are all different from the American concepts such as the individualism, freedom, self-esteem and direct expression.
The mothers in the The Joy Luck Club hope that their daughters can get close to them as they were so close to their own mothers in China. For instance, Am-mei’s Popo tells her that her mother is a ghost to make Am-mei forget her mother. Although Am-mei hasn’t seen her mother for years, she gets to love her mother when her mother combs her hair, and all these things they do are as natural as they do them everyday. And Am-mei says,“This is how a daughter loves her mother. It is so deep it is in your bones.”(Tan 41) when she has seen her mother cutting her flesh to cook soup for her Popo.
But in America, children always do not follow all that their parents tell them and behave what they want to. They emphases their individuality and do not think they have so deep relationship with their mothers. So when Lindo asks her daughter Waverly to finish her coffee, Waverly says:“Don’t be so old fashioned, Ma. I’m my own person.”(Tan 227) However, Lindo thinks she is always beside her daughter, and she never gives her daughter up. 
Perhaps Lindo experiences the largest crisis of cultural identity among the characters. She regrets having given Waverly the American context, at the same time, given her Chinese character, but the two can never be combined. In the story of “Double Face”, Lindo says:
 
“… I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstance and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix? I taught [my daughter] how American circumstance work: If you are born poor here, it’s no lasting shame…In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. She learnt these things, but I couldn’t teach her about Chinese character… How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities…Why Chinese thinking is best.” (Tan 227)
She thinks since she gives her daughter the American name (the name of the road they live in), she lets her daughter be too American, and this becomes the barrier between them. But at the same time, she realizes the American character in herself. She knows that she is no longer Chinese. When she travels to China, the Chinese treat her as an oversea traveler. She is very sad, and she wonders, in the process of changing herself, what she has lost. Her strategies of concealing inner powers is like what Waverly says that it is related with her ability to maintain two aspects of character—American and Chinese. （科教作文网 zw.nseac.com整理）
Second, in the novel, the communication problems also arise because the mothers are from China, while daughters are born in the United States, their cultural backgrounds are different, and also because they speak different languages. For example, June says, “My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meaning and I seemed to hear less than was said, while my mother heard more.”(Tan 27)June looks for meanings in what is stated and does not understand that her mother omits important information because she thinks that her daughter knows it; Suyuan, on the other hand, looks for meanings in what has not been stated and adds many things to what has been stated and comes up with meanings that surprise her daughter June.
Another example is that Rose cannot find the right English terms to meet with “Hulihudu” and “Heimongmong”. “A mother is best. A mother knows what is inside you,” she said…“A psyche-atricks will only make you hulihudu, make you see heimongmong.” Back home, I thought about what she said… [These] were words I had never thought about in English terms. I suppose the closest in meaning may be “confused” and “dark fog”. (Tan 172) Rose thinks “hulihudu” and “heimongmong” can’t be translated to English because they refer to the sensation only Chinese can have.
Third, the mothers and the daughters have totally different experiences. The mothers have been to America during the World War Ⅱ, when China was intruded by Japanese army. They come to America with their American dream. They have suffered a lot before arriving America, and they come to America to search a better life putting all their hope in America, but after living in America for many years, they feel that they lose some of their Chinese tradition and they try to hold fast of the Chinese tradition and pass it to their daughters. The daughters are born in America, they don’t appreciate the Chinese tradition and view their Chinese history as a barrier to their dreams, they resent their mother pouring the Chinese tradition to them and their Chinese way of love, so they do things opposite to what their mother told them to do to disappoint their mothers. In the story “Two Kinds” Jing-Mei says, （科教作文网http://zw.nseac.com编辑发布）
“It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I droped out of college.”(Tan 124)