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The paper aims at analyzing the conflicts between mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club, showing us that we should try our best to achieve a balance between different cultures. Besides, we ought to take a positive attitude towards culture conflicts, which means we should not only learn from others but also spread our culture to others. Only in this way, can we boost common progress of the two countries.
2. Literature Review
Culture is really a large and general concept and nobody can define it clearly. It is reported that there have been at least over 150 definitions of culture, but none of them can tell us what culture is. It is no doubt that there are many differences between Chinese and American cultures. Many people have done numerous researches on the persity between the two cultures. People from different culture backgrounds are bound to have conflicts. The cultural difference reflected in many aspects, such as sense of values, sense of time, sense of education and so on. (Rao Jihong，2005：24)
In The Joy Luck Club, the traditional Chinese culture has a profoundly influence on the four mothers, while the girls don’t have a better understanding of their mothers and Chinese culture because America is their homeland. So the conflicts have been lively depicted in the film. (Peng Yingchun 2004)Daughters can speak English very well and they were taught by American education. America is a supreme inpidualist society; China is a representative communist country. Mothers think everything can be made publicly in the family, then, the mother tries to walk into her daughter’s private life because of the influence of collectivism, but their daughters who believe in freedom and equality cannot stand it. (Guan Jing， 2005:4) During the Waverly’s first marriage, the mother often paid a visit to her home without telling her beforehand, which is a very usual thing in China, but her daughter cannot understand it because this is her private space. When Waverly got prize in chess match, her mother flaunted the prize everywhere. The daughter did not understand her mother’s behavior because from her point of view the glory has nothing to do with her mother. The global countries all pay more attention on the persity between the two cultures. We should seek common ground and find a harmony way to co-exist with each other.
3. Conflicts between Mothers and Daughters in The Joy Luck Club 文献综述
3.1 Different Opinions about Friends
Chinese people will not make a friend at the first time they come across. The longer they get along with, the more they know about each other. For the Chinese, to contact each other frequently, to know to a certain depth, to find out each other’s habits and temper and eventually find out that they share the similar interests and the common experience of “suffering”, then they will treat them as friends in the heart. The Anglo American view of friendship is more practical and the American has a wide definition of friend. Friends do not take any obligations from their friendship under the influence of American culture; therefore their friendship is generally very pale. If two people have the same interest or can talk for a while and then they will become friends. Their friendship perhaps is continuous, close or genuine in the common interest. However, they will quarrel and their friendship will vanish like soap bubbles once they had different opinion about one thing. The four mothers will get together, have dinner, and share the happiness and sadness with each other every weekend. When Suyuan died, her friends tried their best to find her lost twins she had to give up in the war time. They helped their friend Suyuan live up to her wishes because they are Chinese friends. Thanks to the mother’s relationship, their daughters also become friends when they were children, but their relationship seems a little different with their mothers. At Chinese New Year dinner, June and Waverly had a quarrel. June said to Waverly: “although one of my clients seems to think freelance means free just because we are friends.”(Amy Tan, 2005:58) Waverly believed that June’s advertising scheme is unqualified and didn’t give her opportunity to correct. She said: “we are a big firm, and we need somebody who understands that, who understands our style.” (Amy Tan, 2005: 58)Those words are very harsh and may hurt both their feelings at the same time. Their mothers managed to stop them but failed.