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There are many conflicts between mothers and daughters, so the mothers and their daughters are always the focus of other people’s research. What’s more, many people used to study the conflicts of the whole aspects of Chinese and American culture, and this thesis will analyze the difference of marriage concepts, which is a small but important aspect of culture. Family is the basic component of society, and couples are the most important factors in families whose relationship is the most imitate and permanent. Everyone in the world will be faced with marriage. As an important part of culture, marriage concentrates and reflects the cultural characteristics, religious belief, economy and politics of a certain society. Therefore, different marriage concepts between China and America according to The Joy Luck Club will be discussed in this thesis, and furthermore the factors that contribute to the differences in marriage between China and America will be analyzed based on Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory. Whereas the differences can be explained by various theories, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory which has a considerable influence in the field of intercultural theories offers one of the most powerful explanations for this difference. This study aims to increase the mutual understanding of the two countries’ cultures and find an approach to communication so that we can learn from each other and lessen the distance between the two cultures.
2. Literature Review
In the past twenty years, there are numerous mixed research achievements about Amy Tan’s masterpiece The Joy Luck Club. After analyzing them we can find that western academia, especially American academia, most put their emphasis on the implied meanings of race, sex, identity, class and nationalism which are sublimated from the relationship between mothers and daughters. While domestic academia pay more attention to the conflicts and status based on the analysis of the text.
After the publication of The Joy Luck Club, American academia gave high praise to it. Many comments of the book were published on some important American media. After the 1990s, several American critics gave objective and favorable comments on it, such as Amy Ling’s “Between Two Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry”, Ben Xu’s “Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club” and so on (Wan Yongkun&Liu Xiaohong, 2010:63). At the same time, some American Chinese men writers criticized that the book catered to western people’s need for racial curiosity; they said it was not a true description of Chinese culture. Chinese critics tended to give cultural political criticism to the book; they emphasized the conflicts and fusion of sino-American cultures.
Throughout these comments and researches about The Joy Luck Club, we can find different aspects of achievements. Many people have paid attention to the conflicts of mothers and daughters to reveal the differences of culture; some people studied the relations of the characters in this works. There are also some people who have analyzed marriage concepts or family values of China, but this thesis will analyze the marriage concepts from a new perspective. This thesis makes some further analysis in marriage concepts in detail based on these achievements and gives a comparison of them. In addition, this paper will analyze the factors that contribute to the differences in marriage between China and America from the perspective of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory.源'自:751`!论~文'网www.751com.cn
3. Major Differences in Marriage Concepts in The Joy Luck Club
3.1 Choosing a Spouse
In The Joy Luck Club, Zhong Lindong must be married to a little boy, even if it is not her will, she can do nothing but listen to her mother. Yingying is born in a noble family but cannot extricate herself from the tragical fate. In the later years, the mothers want to control their daughters’ lives as well as marriages, but these native daughters don’t obey their mothers at all. At first, Waverly marries a Chinese man who she doesn’t love at all to please her mother, but this marriage fails before long. Then she meets the one she loves, he is Rich. Zhong Lindong doesn’t accept him and tries to prevent them, but Waverly doesn’t compromise this time and determines to go against her mother at last. However, it is opposite to Americans. When Rose meets Tide’s parents as his girlfriend for the first time, his mother is discontent with her and says that her racial identity will affect Tide’s development. At the moment, Tide feels very angry and says he is ashamed about his mother. Regardless of parents’ disagreement, Tide marries Rose soon.