Title: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Chinese American Dialectics in Amy Tan’s "The Joy Luck Club"
Abstract: This paper starts with a brief introduction on the nature of and some theoretical approaches toward the mother-daughter relationship, which embodies the tension between ethnic identity and assimilation. It analyzes how Amy Tan, who has ”claimed America” with the success and popularity of her works, explores the dialectics of Chinese American identities through the portrayal of complicated mother-daughter relationships in ”The Joy Luck Club”, which exemplifies Marianne Hirsch's vision of a mother/daughter plot with stories told by both mothers and daughters. The paper argues that the relationships between the Chinese-born Joy Luck mothers and their American-born daughters parallel those between the daughters and their Chinese American identities-in both, ambivalence dominates. They are characterized by patterns of resistance, conflict, ambivalence, reconciliation, recognition, and connection. In addition, the boundary between Chineseness (or nativism) and Americanness (or assimilation) is fluid, just like that between mother and daughter. The paper claims that both Chinese immigrant mothers and Americanized daughters are hybrids of Chinese and American cultures and that the mother-daughter relationship can be an empowering force for both mothers and daughters to establish their identities as Chinese Americans. The paper proposes that Tan lays out the themes of her novel in the short stories that follow the headings of each of the four sections, for example, the mother-daughter relationship, which is fraught with conflicts, as a trope for female ethnic identity, the hybridization of cultural identities, and the vision of a more reciprocal and mutually empowering relationship between mother and daughter, in which both can teach each other how to be their best and experience joy.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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