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Structurally speaking, the novel is pided into four major sections, with the first and third sections focusing on the stories of the mothers and the second and the fourth sections on the stories of the daughters. These stories present the cultural misunderstandings between the Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. The Chinese mothers just tried their own fashions in accordance with their lifestyle in their homeland and can not accept the daughters’ completely westernized life style. And the daughters don’t understand the unfamiliar Chinese traditional culture. They felt unsatisfied with their Chinese-born mothers when their life was interfered. The daughter did not feel completely at ease in the strange surroundings. Though they loved each other very much, they could not get rid of the emotional barriers easily. To dispel the misunderstanding, mothers told their Chinese stories to their daughters. With the mothers’ help and encouragement, daughters found out solutions and support to confront the difficulties and began to accept the Chinese culture. Eventually, the Chinese mothers and the American-born daughters understood each other.
In this novel, the writer aims to describe the distinct and the changing feelings between mothers and daughters, and finally reach the conclusion that they can still love and respect each other despite the huge cultural differences. In 1993, the novel was adapted into a feature film made by Ronald Bass and Amy Tan.
The thesis is pided into four parts. In the first part, some studies on the cultural conflicts and integration concerning Chinese Americans are illustrated. In the second part, the paper demonstrates factors leading to contradictions and conflicts. The third part focuses on the integration of mother-daughter relationship. The last is the conclusion of the whole thesis.
2. Literature Review
In the past twenty years, there were numerous papers about the research of The Joy Luck Club both at home and abroad, and it got mixed notices. It may be observed by combing some papers that the western, especially American academic circles, mainly concern the comments point about The Joy Luck Club from place to place and the aspects such as nationalism, race, class difference etc., but the western scholars have maintained great interest for this work since it was published. A great number of researchers have focused their attention on this topic and many papers have also been published. The primary reason for this kind of fascination is that sharp contrast between two kinds of quite different cultures embodied in The Joy Luck Club, including mysterious Oriental culture and sensible culture of western people. All of them have experienced a psychological process from monocultures identification to multicultural identification, which is in accordance with Hall’s viewpoint on culture identity: “Far from being eternally fixed” and “subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power” (Hall, 1993:39).Therefore, this novel also becomes a tool for the mainstream white American critics to do some research about the differences between Chinese and western cultures. However, China’s domestic researchers have some different views on the directions of this novel. The Chinese academia study to The Joy Luck Club began in 1994, and since then, there has been an outpouring of literature researches in this field. And a large number of research literatures have been showed in the paper. Throughout the various comments on The Joy Luck Club, most of them are beginning to incline towards cultural political criticism. In the study of cultural problems, for example, they analyze the traditional culture displayed in the article, or discuss the cultural theme of identity from the perspective of cultural criticism and postcolonial perspective. For instance, Wang Xiaohong attributes the complexity of mother-daughter relationships in the novel to the cultural conflicts and integration between Chinese and American culture. She views the opposition between mothers and daughters as the contradiction between Chinese and American culture. It mainly combines cultural conflicts and integration with other topic in my paper, such as the mother-daughter relationship. Putting all factors together we can find the research of The Joy Luck Club from different levels. As a result, we embark on the paper from the aspects of cultural conflict, combining the different view to complete the paper.