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Chinese Traditional Woman Image --- the Chinese Mother in Joy Luck Club by 陆婉霖

A thesis presented to the School of English Studies of
Xi’an International Studies University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts

May 18, 2011

Class: 2007-19

Advisor: 常莉

西安外国语大学
毕 业 论 文 开 题 报 告

|姓名 |陆婉霖 |性别 |女 |班级 |2007-19 |学号 |0701011921 |
|论文题目： |
|Chinese Traditional Woman Image --- the Chinese Mother in Joy Luck Club |
|《喜福会》中中国式母亲体现出的中国传统女性形象 |
|任务起止日期: 2010 年9 月1 日 至 2011 年 5 月27日 |
|论文主要内容及参考文献： |
|本文从跨文化交际和文学的角度对谭恩美的小说《喜福会》进行了分析。通过认知解读传统文化中的女性角色以及书中主人公的遭遇，使读者理解|
|书中上一代母亲们的自我认知历程以及在此过程中所形成的价值观。文中展现了四个母亲和四个女儿的成长背景及人物性格，概述了每个人物所|
|经历的不同境遇，分析了单独事件的文化原因及影响，从而呈现出典型的中国传统女性形象。文章从不同角度举出例子概括这一普遍的社会现象|
|并且分析了母女冲突的原因并且从积极的角度对其结果给予了分析与展望。 |
|参考文献： |
|Beidler, Peter, G. Writing Matters. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 2003. |
|. |
|Ling Amy. “High Context Cultures and Low Context Cultures”. (December13,2004.) |
|Cross Culture-A Developmental Approach. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. |
|Shear, Walter. “The Joy Luck Club-- Generation Dichotomy of Culture”. (1993). |
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|指导教师 (签名) |
| 年 月 日 |

《喜福会》中中国式母亲体现出的中国传统女性形象

摘要：

本文从跨文化交际和文学的角度对谭恩美的小说《喜福会》进行了分析。通过认知和解读传统文化中的女性角色以及书中主人公的遭遇，使读者理解书中上一代母亲们的自我认知历程以及在此过程中所形成的价值观。从而诠释难以理解的中国式母爱。文中展现了四个母亲和四个女儿的成长背景及人物性格，概述了每个人物所经历的不同境遇，分析了单独事件的文化原因及影响，从而呈现出典型的中国传统女性形象。对于母亲们与下一代的误解和冲突，文章从不同角度举出例子概括这一普遍的社会现象并且分析了其中的原因。此外，对于母女冲突的和解而或能否和解，本文从积极的角度给予了分析与展望。

关键词：

跨文化交际；中国式母爱；价值观；母女冲突与和解

Chinese Traditional Woman Image --- the Chinese Mother in Joy Luck Club
Abstract：
From cross-cultural communication and literature perspective, Amy Tan's novel "The Joy Luck Club" is analyzed in a way of interpreting traditional Chinese woman. Through studying the women’s experience in the past time I come to an understanding on their self-esteem and the formation of values, thus interpreting the Chinese maternal love. This paper shows the four mothers and four daughters’ upbringing and character, an overview of each of the different circumstances experienced by people, and a separate analysis of causes and effects of cultural events, to come to a typical Chinese traditional image of women. For the Mother-daughter misunderstandings and conflicts, the article cited examples from different angles of this common social phenomenon and analyzed the reasons. In addition, the paper gives a positive point of view considering the reconciliation.
Key words: Cross-cultural communication; Chinese maternal love; value; conflict and reconcile

Table of Contents
1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………… 1 1. About the author……………………………………………………..………..1 2. Literature review…………………………………………………..………….2
2. Traditional Chinese Women Image………………………………………….….…4 2.1 General analysis………………………………………………………….……4 2.2 The family to a woman ...……………………………………………….….…7 2.3 Relationships with a traditional Chinese woman………………………….…..9
3. Mother-Daughter Relationship: Conflicts and Reconciliation…………….….…12 3.1 Mother-daughter conflicts……………………………………………….…...12 3.2 Mother-daughter reconciliation………… ………………….……………..…14
4. Conclusion…………………………………………………………...……….….15
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………….…….17

1. Introduction
1.1 About the Author Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. In 1993, Tan's adaptation of The Joy Luck Club became a commercially successful film. The book has been translated into 35 languages. Tan has written several other bestselling novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter and Saving Fish From Drowning. She also wrote a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. Her most recent novel Saving Fish From Drowning explores the tribulations experienced by a group of people who disappear while on an art expedition in the jungles of Burma. In addition to these, Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series airing on PBS. She also appeared on PBS in short spot encouraging children to write. Also，Amy Tan is one of the best-known Chinese American writers. She was born into a Chinese immigrant family. Her father, John Tan, is an electrical engineer and Baptist minister, and her mother, Daisy, who was forced to leave her three daughters from a previous marriage behind in Shanghai. This incident 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 Daisy and John Tan's three children. In the late 1960s Amy's sixteen-year-old brother Peter died of a brain tumor. Within a year of Peter's death, Amy's father died of the same disease. After these family tragedies, Daisy moved Amy and her younger brother John Jr. to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school. During this period, 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. Tan received her bachelor's and master's degrees in English and linguistics from San José State University, and later did doctoral linguistics studies at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. Like other Asian Americans, Amy Tan spent her childhood attempting to understand the contradictions between her ethnicity and the western mainstream culture in which she was raised and educated. She lived the typical minority experience: at home, she was an Americanized teenager at odds with expectation of her traditional parents; at school, she was often isolated as the only Chinese girl in class like an outsider.

1.2 Literature Review The Joy Luck Club has always been the interest of American academic circles. In 1989, shortly after its publication, American circles immediately acclaimed The Joy Luck Club. And a lot of book reviews and comments, including John Skow’s Tiger Ladies (Time, March 27, 1989:98), Rhoda Koenig’s Heirloom China (New York, March 20,1989:82), Orville Shell’s Your Mother is in Your Bones(New York Times Book Review, March19,1989:3,28), and Dorothy Wang’s A Game of Show Not Tell (News Week, April 17, 1989: 68-69), began to appear on such important medias as Time, New York, New York Times Book Review, etc. Of these book reviews, Tiger Ladies mentioned the role of the Chinese cultural element like astrology in creating the image of character in the novel, while A Game of Show Not Tell put its emphasis on the novel’s theme of showing the tragic-comic conflicts of cultures and of generations. Your Mother is in Your Bones explored how the Chinese culture is passed from generation to generation in Chinese-American society, and Heirloom China described Amy Tan’s ability to deal with such familiar conflicts as between mothers and daughters, immigrants and natives in a new guise. In the 1990s, research articles kept coming out, among which the following are worth mentioning: in 1993, Marina Heung wrote an article Daughter-text Mother-text: Matrilinage in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (Feminist Studies, Fall 93, Vol.19, Issue3). In this article, Marina Heung noted that, totaling sixteen chapters in all, the novel interweaves seven voices, four of daughters-JingMei Woo, Waverly Jong, Rose Jordan Hsu, and Lena St. Clair and the later three’s mothers-Lindo Jong, AnMei Hsu, and YingYing St. Clair. And in this way that it foregrounds maternal discourse, The Joy Luck Club materialized Marianne Hirsch’s vision of a mother/daughter plot “written in the voice of mothers, as well as those of daughters…in combining both voices that would yield s multiple female consciousnesses”. Meanwhile Marina pointed out that because the maternal voices in the novel bespeak differences derived from the mothers’ unique positioning in culture and history, the subjectives they inscribe, in counter pointing those of daughters, also radically realign the mother/ daughter plot itself. Also in 1993, Walter Shear published Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club (Critique, Spring 93, Vol.34, Issue3), in which he explored the theme of communicating barrier and he thought that “just like The Woman Warrior, the communicating barrier here is a double one, that between generations and that created by the waning influence of an older culture and burgeoning presence of annther”; in 1994, two articles were wonderful, one is Ben Xu’s Memory and Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club(Melus, Spring 94, Vol.19, Issue 1), the other was Stephen Souris’ “Only Two Kinds of Daughters”: Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in The Joy Luck Club (Melus, Summer 94, Vol.19, Issue 2). The former took a close look at the conflict between the two generations of the book and the existential unrepeatability that separates them. Through examining the complexity of the operations of the memory, it also explored “how the recollection and narration of the past are related to a presence of ethnic identity”. The latter’s concern was with “inter-monologue dialogicity”, or “the potential for active intermingling of perspective across utterances, with the site of the dialogicity located in the reader’s experience of the narrative”; in 1998, Zenobin Mistri published Discovering The Ethnic Name And The Genealogical Tie In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (Studies in Short Fiction, Summer 1998, Vol.35 Issue 3), in which the author applied some ideas of William Boelhower and Werner Sollors’ approach that cuts across several disciplines such as cultural geography, anthropology, semiotics, cartography, and cultural history to discuss the thematics and structural bookends in The Joy Luck Club; in 1999, Patricia L. Hamilton wrote an article Feng Shui Astrology, and The Five Elements: Traditional Chinese Belief in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (Summer 1999), which explored how Amy Tan use these Chinese cultural elements in The Joy Luck Club not only for the characterization but also for the development of conflict. Entering the 21st century, there were still some scholars keeping their concerns about The Joy Luck Club. In 2001, Alison Gee wrote an article A Life on the Brink (People, 05/07/2001 Vol. 55, Issue 18), which remarked the reason she began to write The Joy Luck Club: she had to battle the demon, Depression that haunted her mother, while the “joy and luck” stands for hope. Because she thought that the therapist didn’t do a lot to her trust, she started writing fiction in 1985, and “writing helps make sense of what I’m feeling”; in 2002, Zeng Li, who gained his PHD degree in an American university and now works in York University of Toronto, Canada, published an article Two Worlds, or One World? (April 27, 2002), which explored the question of culture identity among Chinese-Americans exposed in the literary works written by Chinese-Americans by comparing Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Trip-master Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). Zeng Li’ conclusion was that The Joy Luck Club drew an outline of a group of Chinese-Americans hesitating at the Two Worlds (that of a Chinese and an American in the context of culture). One way implied in the novel was to seek a balance between the Two in order to solve the problem of identity. My thesis is based on these former studies and explores new thoughts rooted from my own understanding and studies during my four years in the university.

2. Traditional Chinese Women Image
2.1 General analysis In Amy Tan’s novel joy luck club, a sense of traditional Chinese women image comes into being as a great comparison with American image and even the contemporary Chinese woman. By using some symbols implying the traditional women’s values such as the dress and the goose to Suyuan Woo, the mother’s necklace to Lindo Jong, the astrology Lena St. Clair’s mother believe. They are all deeply rooted from the Chinese culture which is enormously abandoned by the time and the society changing. The dowry was enough, more than enough, said my father, but he couldn’t stop my mother from giving me her chang, a necklace made out of a tablet of red jade. When she put it around my neck, she acted very stern, so I knew she was sad. “Obey your family. Do not disgrace us.”…” (The Red Candle) Such old values used to be considered by the new generation as “the sticky four olds” in the Cultural Revolution. However, it turns out that these descriptions have become a big attraction to readers who want to take a glimpse of the mysterious traditional Chinese women and study the old Chinese culture thus the reasons that these women images are created. The author started the stories from Suyuan, Jingmei’s mother, which is originated from the author’s own mother. Apparently the author has the strongest feeling to this figure and intended to demonstrate the kind, persistent, demanding (as the author’s understanding first), while rich in the spirit character. During the Second World War, Suyuan lives in China while her husband at the time served as an officer in ChungQing. She starts the original Joy Luck Club with her three friends to cope with the war. There is little to eat, but they pretend it is a feast, and talk about their hopes for the future. On the day of the Japanese invasion, Suyuan leaves her house with nothing but a bag of clothes, a bag of food, and her twin baby daughters. During the long journey, Suyuan contracts such severe dysentery that she feels certain she will die. Fearing that a dead mother would doom her babies' chances of rescue, she reluctantly and emotionally leaves her daughters under a barren tree, together with all her belongings, along with a note asking anyone who might find the babies to care for them and contact the father. Suyuan then departs, expecting to die. However, she is rescued by a truck and finds out her husband has died. She later remarries, comes to America, forms a new Joy Luck Club with three other Chinese female immigrants she met at church, and gives birth to another daughter. But her abandonment of the twin girls haunts her for the rest of her life. After many years, Suyuan learns that the twins were adopted, but dies of a brain aneurysm before she can meet them. It is her American-born daughter Jing-mei who fulfills her long-cherished wish of reuniting with her elder twin half-sisters. As Suyuan dies before the novel begins, her history is told by Jing-mei, based on her knowledge of her mother's stories, anecdotes from her father, and what the other members of the Joy Luck Club tell her. A common sense in most people’s mind is that Chinese women are not as strong as western women, as they appeared to be highly independent and centered on their own value instead of the husbands’. But in the Joy Luck Club, the read acquired another sense that is Chinese women are strong in a different way that is showed over through tremendous adversity and survive in a different environment while still possessing their traditional good values. Another example is Ying-Ying St. Clair. From a young age, Ying-Ying is told by her wealthy and conservative family that Chinese girls should be meek and gentle. This is especially difficult for her, she feels, because she is a Tiger character. She begins to develop a passive personality and repress her feelings as she grows up in Wuxi. Ying-Ying marries a charismatic man named Lin Xiao, not out of love, but because she believed it was her fate. Her husband is revealed to be abusive and openly has extramarital relationships with other women. When Ying-Ying discovers she is pregnant, she gets an abortion and makes the decision to live with her relatives in a smaller city in China. After ten years, she moves to Shanghai and works in a clothing store, where she meets an American man named Clifford St. Clair. He falls in love with her, but Ying-Ying cannot express any strong emotion after her first marriage. He courts her for four years before she agrees to marry him after learning that Lin Xiao had died, which she takes as the proper sign to move on. She allows Clifford to control most aspects of her life, mistranslating her words and actions, and even changing her name to "Betty". Ying-Ying gives birth to her daughter, Lena, after moving to San Francisco with St. Clair. When Lena is around ten years old, Ying-Ying becomes pregnant a third time, but the baby boy is anencephalic and soon dies. Ying-Ying is horrified when she realizes that Lena, a Tiger like herself, has inherited or emulated her passive behaviors and trapped herself in a loveless marriage with a controlling husband. She finally resolves to call upon the more assertive qualities of her Tiger nature, to appeal to those qualities in Lena. She will tell Lena her story in the hope that she will be able to break free from the same passivity that ruined most of her young life back in China. A sense of traditional，docility，commitment，adamancy，and self-sacrifice has been delivered in the novel as the whole group of traditional Chinese woman image. The standard to judge a woman is if she unconditionally obeys her family, then her husband, and be responsible to her posterity. Technically, among all the values these women hold in the old times, some are precious while some are limited by the time and the man-ruled society. With the trend of slowly wakening and immigration, those women in the novel like YingYing St. Clair and Suyuan Woo are actually realizing their life time self-esteem and making miracles as transferring themselves from the old periodical and geographical condition to a totally unknown land. They proved their strong mind standing out in their fellow generations but still got a deep gap with their next generation.

2.2 The Family to a Woman For the four mothers who grew up before the year 1949, each of them had been through a very traumatic experience either as a child or as a young woman. They were all taught by their society that they were worth almost nothing. They were not valued as individuals, but they gained a sense of self-awareness because of their experiences. The readers gain insight on what life was like for these four amazing, strong, spirited women, and how their unique cultural perspective influenced them. Their daughter’s stories involved the ways their mothers raised them, and how it had affected them as adults, While their experiences were, for the most part, far less traumatic than their mothers’. The author portrayed Lindo Jong as a feature who cherished the family values more than everything in her early time while show her own character slowly during her dramatic experience. Lindo is a strong-willed woman, a trait that her daughter Waverly attributes to her having been born in the year of the Horse. When Lindo was only twelve, she was forced to move in with a neighbor's young son, Huang Tyan-yu, through the machinations of the village matchmaker. After some training for household duties through her in-laws, she and Tyan-yu married when she turned sixteen. She soon realized that her husband was just a little boy at heart and had no sexual interest in her. Lindo began to care for her husband as a brother, but her cruel mother-in-law expected Lindo to produce a grandson. She restricted most of Lindo's daily activities, eventually ordering her to remain on bed rest until she could conceive and deliver a child. Determined to escape this unfortunate situation, Lindo carefully observed the other people in the household and eventually formed a clever plan to escape her marriage without dishonoring herself or her family. She managed to trick her young husband's family that he was actually fated to marry another girl who was already pregnant with his "spiritual child", and that her marriage to Huang Tyan Yu would only bring bad luck to the family. In reality, the girl in question was a mere servant in the household and indeed pregnant, but abandoned by her lover. Freed of her first marriage, Lindo decided to imigrate to America. She married a Chinese-American man named Tin Jong and has three children: sons Winston and Vincent, and daughter Waverly. Family plays a fundamental role to a woman from birth to marriage in old China. The family status determines a woman’s value and family has the absolute right to choose her husband. Furthermore, it’s up to the family that what a woman should and shouldn’t do. Woman’s life long mission was, in return, to be responsible for the family, or, to surrender their own need to the family’s. For Ying-Ying who was abandoned by her first husband and who killed her baby in her womb, there was a metaphor suggesting her virginity as watermelon according to her first husband. While to a woman in that time, virginity to an unmarried girl is as important as life to a woman. Her husband cut the watermelon and rudely laughed with male friends as this action is suggesting doing the same thing to a pretty girl. Although she is pretty, Ying-Ying was not respected as an equal human, but an accessory. From this we can see woman’s individual value was considered not much more than a watermelon. For Rose Hsu Jordan whose mother married a rich husband after her first husband died. The mother was viewed as a shame for the family. Right before Popo became so sick she could no longer speak, she pulled me close and talked to me about my mother,. “Never say her name, “she warned. To say her name is to spit on your father’s grave. The subconscious shame inherited to her daughter even she sacrificed her life to offer the daughter a good life foundation. For example, Rose Hsu Jordan always believes her mother was forced into her second marriage for the good will of her mother. Here we don’t discuss the reality, but the attitude people hold at that time. Even the people who love a woman most will still judge if she follows her free willing and satisfies her own desires. This kind of judgment is not rooted from people’s willing or prejudice, but from the whole society and culture. For thousands of year, people have been through an overwhelming brain wash so that to realize the problem by society has become the greatest obstacle from wakening up.

2.3 Relationships to a Traditional Chinese Woman The concept relationship is understandable in modern time while in the old China it is more understandable to use the expression “marriage” to a woman. The reason is that women didn’t have real relationship in that time. Girls keep being single until their teens and get married. Their husband is supposed to be the only love in life to women. That is to say, a good husband is the life time success and a wrong husband brings endless tragedy to a woman. “In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch. Over there nobody will look down on her…” Thanks to the culture, we seldom see examples that women trying to jump out of this preordained fate. Women depend on either family or husband. Most time these two elements correlation depend on each other. There is no room left for woman as an individual. Grown up in such a tradition, Chinese women developed a habit of forgetting themselves. They forget both the benefit as a free person and the opportunity to be one. Deeply in the heart, they believe in their husband instead of themselves. Self-awareness has been lost for generations and this is also one of the reasons the mothers set high expectations on the daughters. It was too hard for them to break the psychological barrier and transfer their belief from other people to themselves regardless of the language difficulties. I had deep emotions when I read about An-Mei’s mother’s tragedy. The family concept has imprisoned and killed this woman. But the Chinese always have the wisdom that the sacrifice of last generation would bring hope for the next. An-Mei is raised by her grandparents and other relatives during her early years in Ningbo after her widowed mother shocks the family by becoming a concubine to a middle-aged wealthy man after her first husband's death. This becomes a source of conflict for the young An-Mei, as her aunts and uncles deeply resent her mother for such a dishonorable act. They try to convince An-Mei that she is not fit to live with her disgraced mother, who is now forbidden to enter the family home. An-Mei's mother, however, still wishes to be part of her daughter's life. After An-Mei's grandmother dies, An-mei moves out to live with her mother in the home of her mother's new husband, Wu-Tsing. An-Mei learns that her mother was coerced into being Wu-Tsing's concubine through the manipulations of his Second Wife, the favorite. This woman arranged for An-Mei's mother, still in mourning for her original husband, to be raped by Wu-Tsing. The stigma left An-Mei's mother with no choice but to marry Wu-Tsing and become his new but lowly Fourth Wife. She later lost her baby son to Second Wife, who claimed the boy as her own child to ensure her place in the household. Second Wife also tried to win over An-mei upon her arrival in Wu-Tsing's mansion, giving her a necklace made of "pearls" that her mother later revealed were actually glass beads by crushing one with her teacup. An-Mei's mother re-knots the necklace to hide the missing bead, but now An-Mei knows the truth about Second Wife's seeming generosity. Wu-Tsing is a highly superstitious man, and Second Wife took advantage of this weakness by making false suicide attempts and threatening to haunt him as a ghost if he did not let her have her way. According to Chinese tradition, a person's soul comes back after three days to settle scores with the living. Wu-Tsing, therefore, is known to be afraid to face the ghost of an angry or scorned wife. After Second Wife faked a suicide attempt to prevent An-Mei and her mother from getting their own small house, An-Mei's mother successfully committed suicide herself, eating tangyuan laced with lethal amounts of opium. She timed her death so that her soul would be due to return on the first day of the New Year, a day when all debts must be settled lest the debtor suffer great misfortune. With this in mind, Wu-Tsing promised to treat his Fourth Wife's children, including An-Mei, as if they were his very own flesh and blood by an honored First Wife. When Second Wife attempted to disrupt this, An-Mei crushed the fake pearl necklace Second Wife gave beneath her feet to show her awareness of all the deception and to symbolize her new power over Second Wife, who now fears and realizes the bad karma she brought upon herself. An-Mei finally won this battle with the price of her mother’s whole life sacrifice. But it doesn’t mean her life would be triumph ever after. Like other mothers, An-Mei also faced the painstaking conflict with her daughter.

3. Mother-daughter Relationship: Conflicts and Reconciliation
3.1 Mother-daughter Conflicts In the American-born daughters’ mind, on the one hand, mothers can be regarded as nurturing, loving, and protecting their daughter, on the other hand, a mother can also be perceived as hateful, self-centered, excessively controlling and frightening. In The Joy Luck Club, the mothers came to America with American dreams on their children but are painfully aware of their daughters’ distance from them. The mothers came from a traditional Chinese background while their daughters are educated in American schools. They were taught to believe in American superiority and their own in ferocity. As a natural result, they try their best to become “Americanized”, at the same time casting off their Chinese heritage. When they find their mothers cannot assimilate into the American culture, they feel ashamed and humiliated, and thus keep a distance and alienation from them. For example: • Jing-Mei “June” Woo Jing-Mei has never fully understood her mother and seems directionless in life. During June’s childhood, her mother used to tell her that she could be anything she wants; however, she particularly wanted her daughter to be gifted, a child star who amazes the world, like Ginny Tiu (seen briefly on television) or June’s rival Waverly. At the beginning of the novel, June is chosen to replace her mother’s seat in the Joy Luck Club after her mother’s death. At the end of the novel, June is still trying to deal with her mother’s death, and she visits China to see the twin half-sisters whom her mother had been forced to abandon when the Japanese attacked China.
Josh Asbenshade has suggested that the reason for the communication gap between Jing-Mei and her mother, and between the other daughters and their mothers—a major theme of the novel—occurs because the mothers come from a high context culture and the Americanized daughters from a low context culture. The mothers believe that the daughters will intuitively understand their cryptic utterance, but the daughters don’t understand them at all. • Rose Hsu Jordan Rose is somewhat passive and is a bit of a perfectionist. She had an unsettling childhood experience when her youngest brother, Bing, drowned while she was supposed to be watching him and his body was never recovered. Rose marries a doctor, Ted Jordan, who really loved her but also wanted to spite his unthinkingly racist mother. After a malpractice suit, Ted has a mid-life crisis and decides to leave Rose. Rose confides in her mother and An-mei tells her the story of her own childhood. When Ted comes for the divorce papers, Rose finds her voice and tells him that he can’t just throw her out of his life, comparing herself to his garden, once so beloved, now unkempt and full of weeds. She wants to hire a good lawyer and fight for possession of the house, which she eventually wins. • Waverly Jong Waverly is an independent-minded and intelligent woman, but is annoyed by her mother’s constant criticism. Well into her adult life, she finds herself restrained by her subconscious fear of letting her mother down. During their childhood, June and Waverly become childhood rivals; their mothers constantly compared their daughter’s development and accomplishments. Waverly was once a gifted chess champion, but quit after feeling that her mother was using her daughter’s talent to show off, taking credit for Waverly’s wins. She has a daughter, Shoshana, from her first marriage, and is currently engaged to her boyfriend Rich. • Lena St. Clair Throughout Lena’s childhood, she gradually becomes her mother’s voice and interprets her mother’s Chinese words for others. Like her dad Clifford, she translates Ying-ying’s words to sound more pleasant than what Ying-ying actually says. Ying-ying has taught Lena to beware of consequences, to the extent that Lena visualizes disaster in the taking of any risk. Lena’s husband, Harold, is also her boss. He takes the credit for Lena’s business and design ideas. He demands financial “equality” in their marriage. Lena is an associate while Harold is a partner, so he has a larger salary than she does. However, he insists that all household expenses be divided equally between them. Harold believes that by making everything equal, they can make their love equal as well. Lena feels frustrated and powerless. Despite the daughters’ education limitations, the mothers who came through great sorrows and pities in life also cast a shadow over their daughters’ lives. JingMei Woo was forced to be prodigy but got a frustration feeling in all her childhood. Lena St. Clair’s mother had looked in her rice bowl and came to a conclusion that she would marry a bad man. While it is no way for the daughters to experience the hardships and the society environment the mothers had been through, daughters could hardly understand the mothers’ worries and intentions. Using a discourage education in American society; the mothers killed many of the daughters’ natural advantage while it was hard to deliver their Chinese philosophy to the children without real experiences. The daughters become lost and peripherization in the main society, which added the mother-daughter misunderstandings and conflicts. It was not only the 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 dropped out of college. (Two Kinds) Such othering of their mothers has pulled the daughters away from their mothers and made perfect identification impossible.

3.2 Mother-daughter Reconciliation Despite the intense conflicts between the mothers and daughters, Tan is quite optimistic about the daughters’ reconnection to the motherline and further to the Chinese heritage. In The Joy Luck Club the mother-daughter conflicts all developed into a satisfying reconciliation. And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right-hand side. It was called “Perfectly Contended”. I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but the same flowing rhythm and turned out to be quite easy. “Pleading Child” was shorter but slower; “Perfectly Contended” was longer, but faster. And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song. (Two Kinds) Those American borne Chinese are called “bananas” for their appearance is yellow while the inside is white. But Amy Tan emphasize on a heritage and pursue of the Chinese root of these people to create an intact American Chinese woman. She implies that losing a mother-daughter’s reconciliation thus Chinese filiations will lead to a half-baked identification for American borne Chinese. By the end of the novel, in A pair of Tickets, JingMei begins to feel the most acute pain of losing her mother: “I lay awake thinking about my mother’s story, realizing how much I have never known about her, grieving that my sister and I have both lost her”. Her painful realization of loss, paradoxically, signals her new and firm bond with her mother. By the time Jing Mei does reunite with her mother’s long-lost daughters, she has completely revived her dead mother in her heart as now she knows her mother better. In this way, Amy Tan enacts with a dramatic hand Jing Mei’s emotional and psychological reconnection with the mother line. And significantly, it is at this point that Jing Mei acquires a sense of wholeness as a Chinese-American woman.

4. Conclusion By telling the mothers and daughters’ stories in the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan explores the traditional Chinese women, the Chinese unbreakable mother and daughter bond, the culture conflict, and the minority situation in American society. Specifically, each woman’s story is representative and contains difference culture factors. As we know the Chinese tradition is so wide a concept and no universal explanation can give a fully cast of what is general Chinese tradition image. But through the stories in the novel, we can see the forest through single trees since these characters resembled some common Chinese feature and facing the same puzzle as the misunderstanding with the next generation. Chinese woman’s value discussed in this paper turned out to be indelible and impressive to readers. The Chinese women’s struggle and insistence will be shining through time and treasured both in and out of the mainland China. China is a unique nation in the world which keeps its culture for 5000 years and accepting new comings while mix the differences and move forward. The novel reflects this issue and unforgettably, the deep love described in the novel is the impulse for releasing misunderstanding and for reconciliation came into being.

Works Cited
Davies, Ann. Forward. Reading the Classics. By David Dolen. Boston: St. Martin’s, 1996. ii-ix. Print.
Ling, Amy. “High Context Cultures and Low Context Cultures”. 13, December, 2009.
McAlister, Melanie. “(Mis)Reading The Joy Luck Club.” Asian America: Journal of Culture and the Arts 1 (1992): 102-18.
McGraw, Hill. Psychology-A Developmental Approach. 6th Ed. New York. 2005.
Reid, E. Shelley. “‘Our Two Faces’: Balancing Mothers and Daughters in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife.” Paintbrush 22 (1995): 20-38.
Sachs, Andrea. “The Joys and Sorrows of Amy Tan.” Times Mar. 2001: 46-48
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. 1989. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2009. Print.
“The Production of Chinese American Tradition: Displacing American Orientalist Disdourse.” Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992. 319-32.
Twilight of American Culture. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Netlibrary. Web. 22 Aug, 2009.
程爱民. 《论谭恩美小说中的母亲形象及母女关系的文化内涵》. 南京师范大学 (社会科学版). 2001.
刘海平，王守仁. 《新编美国文学史》（第四卷）. 上海: 上海外语教育出版社，2002.
王兆胜, 林语堂. 《脚踏中西文化》. 北京: 北京出版集团, 津文出版社.
张从益. 《中西文化比较研究》. 长沙: 湖南人民出版社，2004.
张琼. “华裔文学中的中国文化形象” . 《中华读书报》. 2005 (3).

西安外国语大学
毕业论文评审表
|学生 |陆婉霖 |性别 |女 |级别 |2007-19 |学号 |0701011921 |
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|论文 |英文 |Chinese Traditional Woman Image --- the Chinese Mother in Joy Luck Club |
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| |中文 |《喜福会》中中国式母亲体现出的中国传统女性形象 |
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说明：1．姓名、性别、级别、学号、论文题目（不得超过18个字）等栏目由学生填写。 2．建议成绩由指导教师填写；答辩成绩由答辩小组填写；论文成绩为最终成绩，由论文指导小组或教研室评议后填写。 3．本表一式两份，一份装订在毕业论文最后一页留学院存档，一份交教务处入学生档案。
西安外国语大学
毕业论文教师指导记录表

系（院）： 英文学院 专业： 英语 指导教师： 常莉

|学生姓名 |陆婉霖 |学 号 |0701011921 |班级 |07-19 |
|第 |指导时间：2010年9月10日 |
|一 次 |指导内容：检查大纲，指导大纲内容。 |
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|第 二 |指导时间：2010年12月23日 |
|次 指 |指导内容：审阅初稿应给予修改意见。 |
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|第 |指导时间：2011年3月10日 |
|三 |指导内容：审阅二稿并提出指导意见。 |
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|第 |指导时间：2011年3月24 |
|四 |指导内容：定稿。 |
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说明：1. 本表一名学生一份，由指导教师填写，工作完成后交教学秘书计算工作量并存档。 2. 请不要把本表与论文一起装订。