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从《喜福会》透视中美文化冲突与融合美文学(2)

2013-05-02 18:09 Ⅲ. The Cultural Understanding and Blending
Although Amy Tan mainly describes the cultural clashes in her novel, her real aim is to explore a balance of cultural conflicts. An important theme of the novel is the reconciliation of the multi-cultural clashes. From the beginning of the novel, Jing-Mei views the gap between her and her mother from two aspects, and this double point of view doesn’t emphasize the generation gap, but instead, it works as the bridge of the communication between the two generations. In the third part of the novel, the four daughters narrate their dilemmas after they grew up, -problems in their marriage and in their careers. Although they think their mothers’ ideas are out of date, when they search for the solutions, they inevitably come back to the relationship with the older generation. At last, mothers offer solutions and support to their daughters, for example, Rose Hsu Jordan finds herself unable to persist in her ideas, to protect herself or to make any decisions. Although she expresses her ideas by disobeying her mother to marry Ted, she still makes herself the victim to Ted. At home, Ted decides everything. At last, she needs her mother’s intervention to realize that to refuse to make decision is itself a decision. The last two groups of stories demonstrate that the cultural understanding and blending are formed.
 
Although Jing-Mei fears that she cannot tell the whole story of her mother, Suyuan runs through the novel with Jing-Mei’s voice, and Jing-Mei speaks for her mother in the first and fourth sections. Suyuan’s story represents the struggle to maintain the mother-daughter bonds through cultural and general gaps. Jing-Mei’s trip to China not only makes reconciliation between Suyuan’s two different life styles, but also the reconciliation between cultures and mother-daughter relationship. In addition, the journey brings hope to other mother-daughter pairs. So they can reconcile the oppositions in the lives between past and present, between cultures, and between generations. （转载自http://zw.nseec.cN科教作文网）
The understanding and reconciliation between mothers and daughters are shaped gradually. As in the last part of the novel, Jing-Mei and her father go to China to look for Jing-Mei’s half sisters. When they arrive in GuangDong and see her father’s aunty, she still can’t understand her mother’s words of how to rebuild Jing-Mei’s genome to let her be a Chinese again. After Jing-Mei’s father tells her Suyuan’s story after she runs away from GuiLin, she knows why her mother leaves the twins on the road. At that time, she feels she just knows a little about her mother who has gone away forever. When she sees her sisters she realizes the Chinese quality which is hidden in her body and totally understands her mother.
In this multi-cultural novel, the author makes us understand the generational and cultural disparity. The daughters once think that their mothers’ Chinese cultural background is the barrier of communication. They cannot understand their mothers’ belief and their ways of love. But when they meet some difficulties in their life, they turn to their mother to find help, and from their mothers’ stories, they finally understand their mothers. Ying-Ying begins to change herself only when she realizes that she has passed her passivity and fatalism to her daughter Lena. She sees the sadness of her daughter’s marriage, and urges her daughter to take an active position. In the story “Waiting between the Trees”, Ying-Ying says:
 “Her wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into the darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything. I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I share the same body there is a part of her mind that is part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore. And now I must tell her everything about my past. It is the only way to penetrate her skin and pull her to where she can be saved.”(Tan 216)

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Amy Tan shows us that a person can remain selective of her culture without giving up the heritage of her tradition. At the beginning of the novel, June Woo says, “My mother and I spoke two different languages… I talked to her English, she answered back in Chinese.”(Tan 20) but after her trip to China, she says: “My mother was right, I am becoming a Chinese.”(Tan 239) The last part of the novel Queen Mother of the Western Skies represents the theme. The mothers are queen mother, whose wisdom the daughters should to. The mothers who suffered a lot never lose hope for the daughters and their relationship with their mothers; finally, June visits her half-sisters to fulfill her mother’s wish.
 
Ⅳ. A Correct Attitude Towards Culture
An unprecedented development happened in America during the 20th century. This rapid development on economy has accelerated the worldwide immigration. There are more and more people who put themselves into the totally new American context while leaving their homeland, being separated from the historical and cultural background they used to live in for political, economic, scientific and cultural reasons. As the living environment is gradually changing, these Chinese immigrants has something changed in their mind, in other words, they feel that their history is gradually fading away, especially their offspring, lose the relation to their native culture. The second and third generation immigrants don’t keep their family tree anymore. They cancel the memory of their elder family members, and they always can’t understand the words of their parents and the legendary stories of their ancestry. They lose the memory of their own nation’s history and the cultural symbol which match with their figures and station. These people, such as Amy Tan and other Chinese-American writers as well as the daughters in The Joy Luck Club, are born and grow up in America, so they don’t realize the meaning of their yellow skin and dark hair. They feel confused and embarrassed to lose the relationship with history only when they are considered as Chinese by others, but they know nothing about their native culture. （科教作文网 zw.nseac.com整理）
 
Although Chinese people are deeply affected by the western culture, especially American culture, in the process of globalization, more and more people realize that Chinese culture has its own value, and it cannot be eliminated. Chinese culture can absorb other cultures’ essence and can keep pace with the world’s development despite the backward aspect of it.
Culture should be treated seriously, and anything that belongs to culture can’t be discarded easily, such as the dragon symbol. Dragon in Chinese culture symbolizes the stubbornness and the Chinese nation, but in western culture, it symbolizes the evil, so some one argues to cancel the dragon symbol. More people, however, argue that the dragon symbol could not be cancelled, for it is the root and the most important thing in Chinese culture. If it were cancelled many Chinese idioms and expressions would lose their root, such as “long teng hu yue” and “long ma jing shen”. Chinese people should have confidence on Chinese culture while learning the excellent cultures from other countries; our own culture should be transmitted to others so that there will be less difficulties in the process of communication.
The westerners view China as a closed country and the people are conservative, lacking of creativity, so a correct attitude to our culture should be held. At the end of the novel, the understanding and reconciliation not only shows the author’s inheritance of Chinese traditional novels, but more important, embodies a correct attitude towards culture, that is, to inherit the mother culture and to absorb the new culture and to find balance between cultures. Today, in the multi-cultural context, if the traditional Chinese culture is given up, there would be no bridge between tradition and new cultures, but if only the native culture is taken seriously and the differences between cultures is exaggerated, the conflicts between cultures will be more intense, and then, there will be no hope of peace, common development and prosperity.
Conclusion
 
In the novel the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan describes the conflicts between the mothers and the daughters. The misunderstandings between the mothers and the daughters in the novel are caused by the different cultural backgrounds and experiences. Fortunately, through painful efforts, the mothers and the daughters begin to understand and communicate each other at the end of the story, which metaphorically demonstrates the transition of the relationship between Chinese and American culture from conflicts to blending.
   As to our Chinese culture, it faces many challenges in the context of globalization. Although learning new technologies from other countries and absorbing the essence of other cultures are necessary, Chinese culture should be protected. History and present interacts each other, and they inherit each other. There's no country in the world which can ignore the past with today’s prosperity. If anyone forgets his past, and loses his history, he will become a person without history and tradition, and he cannot really locate himself in the multi-cultural society, and he will lose the base of development. The Chinese nation has a long and old history; the Chinese-American's history which is bestowed by their nature shouldn't be ignored, and this is the real reason for the mothers to try to combine their history with their lives in American and pass them on to their daughters. In this sense, the aim of recalling the history is to grasp the present and the future better.
 

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（转载自http://zw.ＮＳＥeＣ.cn科教作文网）

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