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4.3 Perceiving the Two Cultures with More Objective Attitudes.16
5 Conclusion..17
Bibliography.18
1 Introduction
Amy Tan is acknowledged as one of the outstanding women writers who has made a lot of contribution to and has great impact on the contemporary Chinese American literature. When it comes to Tan, we will immediately think of her best work The Joy Luck Club, which has been translated into 35 languages. In 1993, the book was adapted into a commercially successful film. While Tan has written many other bestselling novels, such as The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter and Saving Fish from Drowning. She also has written a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. In addition to these, Tan has written two children’s books: The Moon Lady and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat.
Tan was born in Oakland, California to Chinese immigrant parents. Their unusual experience provided the basis for Tan’s first novel, 1989 New York Times bestseller The Joy Luck Club.
Amy is the middle child and only daughter among the three children in her family. In the late 1960s, it is the tough year for Tan to endure the loss of her brother and father.
After these family tragedies, Mother Daisy moved Amy and her younger brother John Jr. to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school. Amy followed her own path. Over the objections of her mother, she majored in college in writing and linguistics and pursued a career in business writing. Although Amy’s relationship with her mother was very difficult, Amy learned about her mother’s former marriage to an abusive man in China, and of their four children, including three daughters and a son who died as a toddler. In 1987 Amy traveled with Daisy to China. There, Amy finally met her three half-sisters.
The Joy Luck Club was obviously autobiographical. The author's experiences were extremely similar to Jing-mei's in the book. It consists of sixteen interlocking stories about the lives of four Chinese immigrant women and their four American-born daughters: Suyuan Woo and her daughter Jing-mei “June” Woo, An-mei Hsu and her daughter Rose Hsu Jordan, Lindo Jong and Waverly Jong, Ying-ying St. Clair and Lena St. Clair. Owing to their special personal identities, these daughters experienced lots of difficult obstacles in the western society. They had to struggle, fought and went through the contradictions between two very different cultures and values to survive in the western society. During their lives, they blamed everything on the fact that their mother was Chinese while they regarded themselves as totally American. Daughters conflicted with the traditional cultures represented by their mothers. They abided by the principle that everything is done in accordance with the western style. So they did their best to integrate themselves into this style no matter how hard it was. However, daughters, after the successions of the failure in their lives, realized the fact that they had to rethink profoundly who they really were and which culture they belonged to. With the guidance and help of their mothers, the daughters made their transformation gradually. Just like the story in the book, Jing-mei returned to China to accomplish her mother’s wish. It showed that they took the responsibilities by searching the root in Chinese cultures and held the idea of inheriting the Chinese cultural traditions.
2 Sadness— The Obstacles of the Self Rebuilding in Western Cultures
According to the novel, we can easily feel the sadness and hardness of the daughters who difficultly survive in the western cultures. What race they belong to is totally different from the people around them. What the obstacles of their self rebuilding in the western cultures can be seen in many aspects.
2.1 The Obstacle in Race
Although daughters think themselves the same as the natives according to the novel, the race is obviously a big obstacle to them.