从《喜福会》透视中美文化冲突与融合 [2]
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-04编辑:黄丽樱点击率:12107
论文字数:4312论文编号:org200904040847154377语种:英语 English地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:The Joy Luck Clubconflictunderstandingcultural blending《喜福会》冲突理解文化融合
er 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.
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.
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 conflict
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