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Although a lot of research has been done on the theme of mother-daughter relationship, culture conflicts and concord, Chinese-American’s identity, feminist perspective, racism and narrative strategy, there is no doubt that mother-daughter relationship, the unique cultural elements and the conflicts and concord between China and America are the key elements attracting readers, to which critics have paid enough attention. Through detailed analysis of these two key elements in this thesis, we can understand Amy Tan and her novel The Joy Luck Club much better.
2 Mother-Daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club
The focus of The Joy Luck Club is surely on the relationship between the immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. Although these four mothers have terrible experiences in China, they still love their motherland and cherish their Chinese identities and values. In addition, they try hard to deliver the Chinese heritage to their daughters and want them to have Chinese values as well. On the contrary, the daughters are not interested in the past and their mothers’ teaching. Gradually, the generational gap turned into conflicts. But as time goes by, the daughters begin to understand and appreciate their mothers’ past and accept their mothers in the end. In fact, it is just the maternal love The Joy Luck Club mothers give to their daughters that finally makes their daughters understand them and also the Chinese culture which they stand for.
In The Cultural Significance of the Mother Image and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Amy Tan's Novels ,Cheng Ai-min indicates that “by artistically telling the stories of the Chinese mothers, Tan successfully creates the mother image” (2001:113). He concludes the image of the mother as “the carrier of Chinese culture and tradition, the medium of history and memory, and the bridge of past and present” (2001:113). Therefore, the mother-daughter relationship implicates the conflicts and blending between Chinese and American culture. And then, the thesis will mainly talk about how these conflicts and concords between mothers and daughters presented in this novel.
2.1 The Differences and Conflicts
Conflicts are the main plots in The Joy Luck Club. Since the two generations are born and grow up in different cultural environments, The Joy Luck Club mothers and their daughters have many conflicts. The mothers are deeply influenced by the traditional Chinese culture, while their daughters are born and get educated in the United States, whose culture is a completely different one. Thus it is quite hard for mothers and daughters to understand each other.
The description of the conflicts between mothers and daughters expresses the clash between Chinese culture and American culture. Mothers represent Chinese traditional culture and daughter represents American culture. The two cultures always clash in the process of mother-daughter communication. The conflicts are clearly shown from three aspects — expressing manners, different personal values and different understanding on traditional Chinese and Western culture.
2.1.1 Conflicts with Expressing Manner
In The Joy Luck Club, mothers and their daughters have different expressing manners. The main reason which causes the conflict on expressing manners is that Chinese and Western society have different thinking paths and methods. It is known to the world that Oriental people prefer to leave others much space to understand what they say instead of expressing their ideas directly, while Western people prefer to both get information and deliver information of someone directly. When mothers in The Joy Luck Club express their ideas, they would like to imply what they want to say to their daughters. American-born daughters, on the contrary, would like to express their ideas directly. Different expressing manners lead to conflicts between mothers and daughters.
One way of understanding the difference is to look at communication in these cultures. Chinese culture can be classified as a high-context culture and American culture as a low-context culture. In a low-context culture, as Edward T. Hall explains, “Most of the information must be in the transmitted message in order to make up for what is missing in the context” (Twitchell,1990:67). In a low-context, culture change is rapid and easy while high-context cultures are highly stable and slow to change.