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e accepted is the American mainstream culture which is somehow contradictory with Chinese culture.
However, due to the maternal love of the Joy Luck Club mothers, the mothers and daughters finally understand each other. The maternal love in the Joy Luck Club helps the daughters understand their mothers; furthermore, its significance lies in that it serves as a bridge of cultural understanding between Chinese culture and American culture.
I. Conflicts Between Mothers and Daughters
in the Joy Luck Club
Conflict is the main plot in the Joy Luck Club. Because 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 the Joy Luck Club mothers and daughter can never understand each other. The daughters at first have a strong prejudice against their mothers and the Chinese culture. Born in the United States and brought up in American mainstream culture, they inevitably hold a prejudice against their mothers and the Chinese culture. They believe that American culture is superior to Chinese culture. In their eyes, their mothers symbolize backwardness and ignorance. They are dissatisfied with their mothers who use toothpick in public. They are ashamed of their mothers who open jars to smell the insides in grocery stores and they are angry with their mothers who like to use them to show off. Naturally the four daughters try to identify themselves with American mainstream culture. Both Rose and Lena marry Americans or what their mothers call Waiguoren. They admire the Americans and their culture so much that they are willing to make sacrifice for their American husbands. Waverly thinks that her mother’s Chinese outlook would make her lose face when she attends her wedding, so she conspires with her beauty parlor to dress up her mother in an American style. The Joy Luck Club mothers intervene so much in their daughters’ life that the daughters feel their mothers’ love is not embracing but suffocating. Waverly, a chess prodigy thinks she has grown cleverer than her mother who gives her “invisible strength.” Lena fears being drawn into her mother’s madness and consoles herself by imagining others who have a life worse than hers. Rose, whose mother cannot let go of the memory of her son who drowned, now believes that by hoping for less, one isn’t vulnerable to loss. And June believes it is her mother’s impossibly high expectations that make her feel that even today, she is a failure.
On the other hand, for the Joy Luck Club mothers, they also cannot understand some behaviors of their American-born daughters. Their behaviors are so different from their mothers’ culture that their mothers even feel distain about the American culture. Ying-ying can’t bear the go-Dutch rule between Lena and her husband. Under the rule, the couple only pays for their common life expenditures that both of them have to use in their daily life. If they want to buy some personal commodities, they must pay for themselves. This is no surprise in the western countries, especially in the U.S. But according to the Chinese culture in which their mothers were born and grew up, it’s unacceptable. A married Chinese couple cannot calculate the family financial expenditure so clearly; they must sh