从《喜福会》透视中美文化冲突与融合 [4]
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:12103
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
But at the same time, she realizes the American character in herself. She knows that she is no longer Chinese. When she travels to China, the Chinese treat her as an oversea traveler. She is very sad, and she wonders, in the process of changing herself, what she has lost. Her strategies of concealing inner powers is like what Waverly says that it is related with her ability to maintain two aspects of character—American and Chinese.
Second, in the novel, the communication problems also arise because the mothers are from China, while daughters are born in the United States, their cultural backgrounds are different, and also because they speak different languages. For example, June says, “My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meaning and I seemed to hear less than was said, while my mother heard more.”(Tan 27)June looks for meanings in what is stated and does not understand that her mother omits important information because she thinks that her daughter knows it; Suyuan, on the other hand, looks for meanings in what has not been stated and adds many things to what has been stated and comes up with meanings that surprise her daughter June.
Another example is that Rose cannot find the right English terms to meet with “Hulihudu” and “Heimongmong”. “A mother is best. A mother knows what is inside you,” she said…“A psyche-atricks will only make you hulihudu, make you see heimongmong.” Back home, I thought about what she said… [These] were words I had never thought about in English terms. I suppose the closest in meaning may be “confused” and “dark fog”. (Tan 172) Rose thinks “hulihudu” and “heimongmong” can’t be translated to English because they refer to the sensation only Chinese can have.
Third, the mothers and the daughters have totally different experiences. The mothers have been to America during the World War Ⅱ, when China was intruded by Japanese army. They come to America with their American dream. They have suffered a lot before arriving America, and they come to America to search a better life putting all their hope in America, but after living in America for many years, they feel that they lose some of their Chinese tradition and they try to hold fast of the Chinese tradition and pass it to their daughters. The daughters are born in America, they don’t appreciate the Chinese tradition and view their Chinese
history as a barrier to their dreams, they resent their mother pouring the Chinese tradition to them and their Chinese way of love, so they do things opposite to what their mother told them to do to disappoint their mothers. In the story “Two Kinds” Jing-Mei says,
“It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I droped out of college.”(Tan 124)
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
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