What Amy Tan knew about China was from her mother, her family and the Chinese community she lived in, so her cognition of China and Chinese culture was partial and fragmental。 “…her knowledge of China mainly came from her mother, whose experience in China long ago constructed much of the content of their daily dialogues”(Yang Jing, 2008)。 Combining the influence of American culture on her, she had some misunderstandings towards China。 And the image of China in her works was the China in her mind rather than the nation as it was。

Most of Amy Tan’s novels are autobiographical。 She is good at writing the relationship and emotions between mother and daughter, partly due to her personal experience。 Almost in every story in The Joy Luck Club, readers can see the shadows of Amy Tan and her mother。 The relationship between Chinese mothers and their Chinese American daughters is an important theme of the novel。 Not only in her first novel, but in The Kitchen God's Wife and The Bonesetter's Daughter Amy Tan also focuses on the mother-daughter relationship。

1。2 Literary Review on The Joy Luck Club

Up to now, many researches have been done on the novel from various aspects。

What is most commonly mentioned is the mother-daughter relationship in the novel。 Patricia P。 Chu points out that although intergenerational differences exist, The Joy Luck Club challenge it by suggesting that the mothers and daughters are linked by blood and gender。 And the portrayals of mother-daughter relations in her novel not only represent the relations between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters, but also mothers and daughters from various ethnicities (2000)。文献综述

While most people focus on the generational tension inherent within the mother-daughter relationships of four immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters, one author, Michelle Gaffner Wood, turns to the relationships between the earliest generation of Chinese mothers and their China-born daughters and how these earlier relationships influence the family tensions and loneliness these all four San Francisco mother-daughter pairs experience。 He points out that the mothers and daughters who live together in China share the same geographical landscapes that transcend the potential generational pide in their relationships。 However, conflicts rise in mother-daughter relationships in America because the lack of sharing of geographical landscapes from which those cultural stories originate (2012)。 

Besides, many researchers also conduct researches on self and identity in the novel。 Michael Delucchi uses George Herbert Mead's theory of symbolic interaction to examine self and identity among aging immigrants in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club。 He intends to assess how identity develops out of particular social conditions and is achieved through social psychological processes (1998)。 Wang Qili focuses on the similarity and differences of role awareness between Chinese and Western women, through analyzing all the heroines’ struggle and fate in The Joy Luck Club, from the perspective of Feminism (2015)。 And Zheng Meihua attempts to explore a new cultural identity from the Chinese American’s marginalized situation in the novel (郑梅花，2016)。 Cultural identity has long become a theme in Chinese American literature。 Chinese Americans, hovering between Chinese background and American culture, are feeling awkward to get in the American mainstream society。 For the mothers, they came to America full of hopes。 But with Chinese traditional cultures in them and the rigid experiences they had in the past, they couldn’t easily take in another culture as their daughters did。 And the daughters in the novel, born in America and grew up as an American。 Although behaved like Americans, with their Asian looks, they were still out of the American mainstream society。 What Sha Sha pays great attention to is the exploration of ethnic identification of the second generation of Chinese American women immigrants, taking the daughters in The Joy Luck Club for example (沙莎，2016)。 Living in America, the daughters passively received from their mothers the traditional Chinese cultures, which are actually out of time。 As they grew up, they gradually understood their mothers and the culture accompanying them, finally recognized their dual identity。