Amy Tan's creative characteristics.

The literary thought of Amy Tan's works: constructing Chinese American identity and establishing mother-daughter relationship in cultural collision.

In 1950s and 1960s, the rise and development of the African-American civil rights movement aroused the awareness of ethnic minorities about their own national characteristics. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club shows more the differences and conflicts between Chinese and American heterogeneous cultures. She is not satisfied with the bondage of China culture, but caters to the mainstream American society blindly, trying to speak for the marginal disadvantaged races and marginal cultures and explore her own identity. Amy Tan's thinking about "Who am I" is more urgent.

The Joy Luck Club reflects the differences between two generations and two cultures by describing the story between mother and daughter. It is in this kind of conflict that the mother and daughter in the story understand that they are not pure China people and Americans, but Chinese Americans who are compatible with Chinese and American cultures. As a kind of identity, culture must be connected with the nation to which cultural individuals belong in order to gain strength.

Through the motif of mother-daughter relationship, the novel shows that the contradiction between mother and daughter can be finally solved. This shows the historical inevitability of Sino-American culture moving from conflict to integration, and reflects the author's hope to determine his cultural identity through dialogue and integration between Chinese and American cultures. The four mothers in the novel all went through hardships in China, but they all overcame multiple difficulties by virtue of their patience, perseverance, hard work, self-reliance and intelligence, gained a new life in the predicament and started a new life in the United States. However, it is not a broad road to meet them, because they are rejected by the mainstream American society and troubled by the real life in a foreign land. Because they are branded with China culture in their bones, they are incompatible with the mainstream American culture. In order not to be shut out of the mainstream American culture, they have to suppress their personality formed on the basis of China culture. Unlike her mother, her daughter grew up in the United States, caught between China culture taught by her mother and American culture endowed by society. They are no different from Americans in language, manners, thoughts and values, so they always have a tense relationship with their mothers with traditional China culture. At the end of the novel, I saw that Wu Jingmei didn't understand her mother's good intentions and finally understood her mother's care and care. Finally, she decided to go to Shanghai to recognize her long-lost twin sister and fulfill her mother's last wish. Here, the motif of mother-daughter conflict in the novel has been sublimated, the mother-daughter conflict has been communicated and understood, and Chinese and American cultures have also moved from conflict to dialogue and blending.

Amy Tan shows the cultural conflict between China and the United States from the literary level, and the theme of her works also reflects that the writer is caught in the gap between the two cultures, or tries to find himself in the conflict through reconciliation or resistance, and tries to construct his own cultural identity, thus completing the new construction of the connotation of the motif of "relationship".

Amy Tan's novel The Bonesetter's Daughter is a classic work with national themes. She vividly wrote the birth and mutual growth of maternal love under the relationship between three generations of mother and daughter in a retrospective way. And by giving them the dominant position and power of women, they subverted the dual identity of dissidents. This work fully embodies the introspective vision and experience of the three heroines in resisting racial oppression in the matriarchal dimension. Although Ruth, the third generation Chinese daughter in the novel, was born and raised in the United States, she was still rejected by mainstream social groups everywhere. The unhappiness of social life and her mother's irrationality made her lose the courage to establish a sense of identity. However, in the atmosphere of family exclusion, mother Ruling had to run around to escape her secret identity, and her daughter's misunderstanding made her eager to talk and understand. Aunt Bao, as a grandmother, lived a miserable life. She was framed, disfigured, lost her voice and oppressed by the fact that her flesh and blood could not recognize each other, which made her lose her self-identity and finally died with hatred.

The sense of identity crisis of three generations of mothers and daughters has contributed to misunderstanding and contradiction, injury and resentment, and it is this inextricable connection that makes them deeply explore the quality of maternal love. The persistence, self-struggle and yearning for true love inherited from the maternal line will eventually dispel the misunderstanding between mother and daughter. They run in with each other in their growth and gain understanding through misunderstanding. Growing understanding opens the door to dusty memories, and the hidden past will eventually become the cornerstone of the protagonist's growth. From aphasia to listening, from loss to exploration, from misunderstanding to acceptance, from ignorance to growth, this series of processes can thoroughly analyze the true feelings that maintain home and roots. All this means the re-establishment and consolidation of the status of family women, and the growth after matrilineal status means the refresh of history and the rebirth of individuals.

The resolution of the hegemonic relationship between the East and the West is achieved through the understanding and recognition of American culture represented by daughters and China culture represented by mothers. Equal cultural exchange is Amy Tan's beautiful wish to promote cultural integration. The misunderstanding and contradiction between China's mother and daughter are the expression of their equal understanding of the relationship, and also reflect their new understanding of their respective identities.

Chinese women's exploration of their own cultural identity is not only the result of Chinese women's efforts to enter the mainstream culture of the United States, but also the product of the integration of foreign cultures and the promotion of ethnicity by ethnic minorities.

In the United States, the strong white culture requires ethnic minorities to give up their racial characteristics and convert to mainstream American culture, but fails to give Chinese women equal right to speak. Women in China who are oppressed by the patriarchal culture need to break the oppression of the patriarchal society, deconstruct the central subject position of men and find their own belonging. Narrative structure

Many of Amy Tan's novels have one thing in common in structure, that is, the dual narrative structure. In two narrative levels, there are often two narrators (mostly mothers and daughters). The two narrators described their past experience and present life respectively, and they constantly changed between them, thus interweaving the present and the past and bringing different aesthetic feelings to readers. Through this structural arrangement, the author shows the themes she always likes to present: mother-daughter conflict, cultural relations and so on.

There are two narrators in The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Bonesetter's Daughter and The Girl of Inspiration, but The Kitchen God's Wife is not a double narrative structure. In this work, the two narrators, mother and daughter, have a clear division of labor. The first and second chapters are about her daughter Pearl, mainly about her mother and her life in America. Chapter 3: From the beginning to the end, Jiang Weili-Winnie tells her experiences in China and her current life in the United States. Mother-daughter narrative does not interfere with each other, there is no difference, and the narrative status is equal. Therefore, for each narrative layer, it is actually a linear structure, and each layer is advanced in the order of real time. Except the Kitchen God's Wife, several other works have obvious characteristics of double-layer narrative structure.

First of all, Amy Tan's first novel The Joy Luck Club adopts a dual narrative structure. There are seven narrators in the novel, and the beginning and end of the work are beautifully described by Wu. She tells about Wu Suyun's past and real life. Although it is not long, it is an important clue that runs through the whole novel. As the first narrator of the novel, Wu Jingmei's narration constitutes the first narrative layer of the novel, while the other six narrators are the second narrators, and their narration belongs to the second narrative layer. Since there are two narrative levels, the connection between them is very important, and Amy Tan has done a good job in dealing with the connection between the two levels.

At the end of Wu's Exquisite Story-The Joy Luck Club, he wrote: "They started peeling rotten peanuts again, telling their own stories and recalling the good times that passed away, but everything will be fine." This is the subtle narrative of the first narrator, Wu. This passage is used as a reminder to tell readers. The following will be replaced by other members of the Joy Luck Club to tell their own stories and turn to the second narrative level. The first one is The Story of Scar-The Story of Xu Anmei. Afterwards, from The Story of Scar-The Story of Xu Anmei to Swinging Between America and China-The Story of Gong Linda, six narrators tell their own stories in turn, either the mother tells her past experience in China or the daughter tells her present life in the United States.

Gong Linda, the last narrator in the second narrative level, mainly talks about her and her daughter's "China" and "Americanism". She thinks her daughter is American, but white people disagree with her. Gong Linda recalled that before she returned to China, China people had regarded her as an American. This part of the narrative shows the dilemma of China's female identity. As a result, the narrative of the second narrative level ended, and then it was transferred to the first narrative level. The transition between the two is also very smooth. Wu Jingmei continued Gong Linda's topic and told the story of her return to China. When she set foot on the land of China, she felt that her mother was right. "Only then did she fully become a China native." Wu Linglong finally found her porcelain and admitted that she was also from China. In this way, the author connects the two narrative layers through the same topic, so that the reader does not feel any bad feelings at all, and it seems that the whole novel is still a complete synthesis, not fragmented.

Secondly, Inspiration Girl is also a double-layer narrative structure. In this work, Amy Tan arranged two narrators and two narrative levels. Sister Olivia is the first narrative layer, and Sister Kuang is the second narrative layer. Olivia mainly talks about her life in America, while Kuang mainly talks about her and her sister's past lives. These two narrative layers are intertwined. Olivia's narrative will always be integrated into Kuang's narrative and then return to Olivia's narrative. The two clues go hand in hand and merge with each other. The cohesive devices used by Amy Tan in this work are mainly the hints of the narrator. For example, in the second chapter of the first part of the work, Olivia, as the first narrator, tells what Kuang said to her every night. It is described in the work: "I fell asleep at last, but in fact I have always forgotten what her story is about." So, which part is her dream and which part is my dream? Where do they cross? I don't know. Every night, she tells these stories to me, but I lie there helplessly, hoping she will shut up. Yes, yes,' I' must have been in 1864.' I' remember now, because that year sounded strange. "Libby-ah, listen to this: one, eight, six, four," said Miss Banner. This is like saying: lose hope and slide to death. And' I' said, no, that means: get hope, the dead stay. Chinese is good and bad: there are so many meanings, all in your mind. "

First of all, it should be noted that the two paragraphs quoted above are two connected paragraphs in the text. The first paragraph is the first narrative level, namely Olivia's narrative. She mentioned that "every night, she tells me these stories", which is a hint to the next narrative level, letting readers know that the next story may be told.

In the second paragraph, "Libby-A, listen and see", this sentence tells readers that the narrator has become Kuang ("Libby-A" is Kuang's nickname for Olivia), and through the prompt of the previous narrator, he smoothly enters the second paragraph of narrative, which is the cohesive way that Amy Tan often adopts. For example, "What are you talking about? How is it possible that Yi is not his name? " Kuang looked from one side to the other, as if she wanted to expose the identity of the drug Lord. "Now I want to tell you something. Oh, don't tell anyone. Promise me, Libby-huh?" I nodded, reluctantly, but already attracted. Then Kuang began to speak one by one in Chinese. "

On the first narrative level, the conversation between two people mentioned "the name of the father". Kuang told Olivia that her father's real name was not Yi, which made Olivia very curious. Then, "Kwong began to speak in Chinese", and Olivia clearly hinted that Kwong's story was the next one, which naturally transitioned to the second narrative level. Then, the second narrator, Kuang, said, "What I told you is true. Libby-A ... Dad used someone else's name. He stole the fate of a lucky man. During the war-that's when it happened-my father studied physics at the National Guangxi University. Dad is a child of a poor family, so his English is so good. "

Kwong talked about the origin of his father's current name, which satisfied Olivia's curiosity. At the end, he called "This is why you have to go to China, Libby-A", which brought the reader back to the first narrative level. In this way, Amy Tan closely interweaves the two narrative levels.

Inspired Girl continues the features of The Joy Luck Club in structure, and also adopts a double-layer narrative structure. Although it is similar to it, it is not exactly the same as the Joy Luck Club. Compared with The Joy Luck Club, the two narrative levels in Inspired Girl are more closely combined. Because they are intertwined, from the first narrative layer to the second narrative layer, and then from the second narrative layer to the first narrative layer, they are constantly changing, and the two narrative layers occupy the same weight in the text, showing a "dialogue" effect in structure. However, the relationship between the two narrative levels in The Joy Luck Club is not so close. The second narrative level in the text is much larger than the first narrative level, and there is only one complete transformation between the two, and the "dialogue" effect reflected in the structure is far less than that in "Inspired Girl". Therefore, the double-layer narrative structure of Inspired Girl is slightly better than that of The Joy Luck Club, which also shows that the writer has been exploring the structural arrangement of his works.

Narrative strategy

Narrative perspective: Narrative perspective refers to the perspective of observing the story when narrating. The main narrative method used by Amy Tan in her works is the first-person retrospective narrative. 16 stories in The Joy Luck Club are all told by "I", while the second part of The Bonemaker's Daughter is the first-person narrative of mother Ru Ling. Ruling's narrative actually comes from the manuscript she left for Ruth. The narrator just copied Ru Ling's narrative before she went to the United States, and the story after she went to the United States was told by Ruth, so Ru Ling didn't get the real narrative voice. Indeed, from the overall structure, Ru Ling's narrative is included in Ruth's narrative, but if we only analyze the perspective of characters, the narrative perspective in Ru Ling's manuscript is Ru Ling's own perspective.

Kitchen God's wife is the first-person narrative of mother Winnie from the third chapter. This first-person retrospective narrative usually has two perspectives: one is the narrator's perspective of recalling the past (that is, the retrospective perspective of the first-person protagonist's narrative from the external perspective, that is, "narrative self"), and the other is the perspective of the recalled "I" when experiencing events (that is, the experience perspective of the first-person narrative from the internal perspective, that is, "experiencing myself"). Amy Tan is good at it. In addition, a few of Amy Tan's works involve the limited perspective of the third-person fixed figure (such as the narrative part of Ruth in The Bonemaker's Daughter), but this narrative perspective is not common in her works.

First-person narration from an outsider's perspective: For example, the story of "Red Candles and Tears Attacking Linda" in The Joy Luck Club says: "Even if I know that I will marry such a bad man as my wife, I can't disobey it, I can only accept my fate. Now' I' understand that all old-fashioned families in rural areas are like this. The pace of life in our family is always a few beats slower than others, and we stick to old pedantic and stupid habits. In some cities at that time, men were already free to choose their wives, and of course they had to get their parents' consent in the end. But this new trend of thought has nothing to do with our family. Choose a good daughter-in-law who can manage her husband well, be filial to her in-laws, continue to burn incense at her in-laws' house, and always go to the grave after a hundred years. "

The words "I understand now" and "at that time" in this passage indicate that the first-person narrator Gong Linda is recounting the past in a way of recollection, which means that Linda is evaluating her past from her present position. Although she later learned that the husband she married was a terrible person, she still felt that it could not be disobeyed in the society at that time, because that was the social tradition at that time. Through this narrative of "narrative self", the narrator makes the reader not only understand her experiences at that time, but also see the narrator's views on social traditions at that time. In addition, readers seem to be able to see the author's views on China in the early 20th century: China was backward at that time, and oppression of women was widespread. The first generation of China women in China can only accept their fate, and they can only follow the "parents' words" in their marriage. At that time, it was basically impossible to choose your own destiny freely.

Mother image

Mothers can be used as metaphors and symbols of everything that raises them, such as the motherland, hometown, cultural traditions, land, rivers and so on. In the values of China people, the feelings for mother and land are equally deep, and the kindness of nurturing is above everything else. Although the second-generation and third-generation immigrants who grew up in the United States may not be able to accept and follow this traditional cultural value concept, when they blur their self-identity and feel the sense of loss in history, only their mother can answer their confusion, because her mother knows them best and knows the authority of all history.

Amy Tan made this clear in The Joy Luck Club. When Rose's marriage with her husband was in crisis and she wanted to go to a psychologist to find the answers to her inner contradictions, her mother Xu Anmei told her: "Mother is the best, she knows everything in your heart. Psychologists will only make you confused and dark. When I got home, I thought over what she said. She is right. " After reflecting on the meaning of life after her mother's death, Jason Wu said: "She (mother) is the only person I can ask: the only person who can tell me the meaning of life and help me bear the sadness."

Like the four mothers in The Joy Luck Club, Jiang Weili-Winnie in The Kitchen God's Wife knows everything about the past, has memories that affect their lives, and is familiar with the cultural background, historical environment and all the secrets about her daughter. They are the only bridge between history and the present. Only through their mothers can these daughters cross the fault of national and family history and make up for their deep sense of historical loss.

Through the description of mother-daughter relationship, Amy Tan highlights the contradiction between history and present faced by Chinese-American descendants who are divorced from national history, as well as their thinking about life, fate and life choices. Amy Tan juxtaposes her mother's past with her daughter's present in the text, which forms a strong dialogue form and tension relationship both in time and in region. Its purpose is to deconstruct the binary opposition between history and the present, and show that history and the present are both inclusive and inherited from each other. Amy Tan crosses history and the present diachronically and synchronically by artistic means, and then constructs the inheritance and development relationship between the history of the Chinese nation and the new generation of Chinese Americans. The Chinese nation has a long and splendid history, and the history given to Chinese children by God cannot and does not need to be erased. This is the true meaning of mother sewing history with memento mori and presenting it to her daughter.

On the other hand, recalling history is to better grasp the present and the future. For Chinese Americans living in the mainstream culture of the United States, understanding the history of the Chinese nation will give them a sense of belonging, give them a sense of roots and confidence, and then maintain a history or national personality different from the mainstream in American society, so as to hold their heads high and be a China person. It is for this reason that, in the words of the Joy Luck Club, "in fact, it is becoming a fashion for Chinese Americans to use their Chinese names." For the vast majority of Chinese, the history of losing their own nation will become rootless; It is also wrong to use our national history as a weapon against the mainstream American society. The key is how to grasp a degree and combine the two perfectly, as the mothers in The Joy Luck Club hope. Of course, this combination is quite difficult. As Zhong, a mother, said, "I hope my children can combine perfectly: the American environment and China's personality. I really didn't expect these two things to be difficult to blend together. "

History can be the coordinate of the present, the comparison and the source of strength. However, if history is used as a weapon against the present, it will fall into the quagmire of history and make mankind stagnate or even retrogress. The history of a nation is the past and the tradition. Only when the tradition is consistent with the times and synchronized with the development of the times can it become the driving force for the development of social history and the real human cultural heritage. This is especially important for Chinese Americans living in a multicultural American society.

As the carrier of China culture, the image of mother occupies the emotional center of Amy Tan's novels. This image is an image of an old woman with prototype characteristics. This image has gained a unique meaning, because it represents hometown, motherland, foundation and the source of life. In the story of The Joy Luck Club, the mother connects history with the present through memory, while the daughter seeks roots, finds herself and determines herself through memory, because they are the continuation of her mother. However, these China daughters didn't realize at first that they could find their place in another culture from their mother. They were moved by their mother's sad stories, but only by them, because they didn't think the stories of their mothers who happened in distant China meant anything to them. They are Americans with two different cultural backgrounds, and even think that they are fundamentally different from their mothers.

However, the daughters didn't believe it at first, but finally realized that everything about their mother had a lingering influence on them. Their potential "China" is certain, whether because of their blood relatives or because they live with their mothers day and night. When Wu Linglong's mother told her about it at the Joy Luck Club, Wu Linglong didn't believe it at that time. "You can't decide. When I was 15 years old, my mother told me that at that time, I strongly denied that there was even a little so-called China in my body. At that time,' I' was a sophomore at Galileo High School in San Francisco. All my white friends agreed that' I' was exactly like them, but had nothing in common with China people. But my mother studies in a famous nursing school in Shanghai. She said that she knew everything about genetics. So whether I admit it or deny it, she never doubts that as long as you are born in China, you will unconsciously feel and think in the way of China people. One day you will know, mother said, these things live in your blood, waiting for the time to be released. "

Daughters think that this "China" is only a superficial difference in behavior. For example, Wu Jingmei thinks that her mother's "China" refers to "the collection of exposed Chinese actions, all the actions that my mother has done that embarrass me: bargaining with the shopkeeper, picking my teeth with toothpicks in public, color blindness, and thinking that lemon yellow and pink are not the color matching of winter clothes." Although there are many defects and deficiencies in China's traditional culture, daughters are blind and ignorant of China culture instead of seeing these defects and deficiencies, but they have to face the China culture around them every day, which leads to the conflict between mother and daughter, that is, the conflict between the two cultures in another sense. Therefore, the daughter's complex feelings about her mother, which are both familiar and unfamiliar, love and hate, are to a great extent a portrayal of the attitude and feelings of the younger generation in China who have accepted American culture towards China and China.

The relationship between mother and daughter in The Joy Luck Club seems to be a struggle between freedom and authority. On behalf of authority, the mother tried to shape her daughter with her own ideas and refused her independence; Daughter symbolizes freedom, trying to deny the authority of mother and get rid of her influence. In fact, under this superficial symbol, there is a conflict and contest between two cultures: mother sticks to China's cultural tradition and hopes to design her daughters' future according to her own ideals and wishes, that is, China's personality needs to be combined with the American environment.

They want their daughters to rely on their own China characteristics and seize all the good opportunities provided by the American environment. Once a daughter doesn't make the right choice according to her mother's expectations, she will be very angry; Daughters, on the other hand, make China's personality incompatible with the American environment. What they want more is to seek their own freedom, fully agree with the American way and abandon the other way.

China's daughters born in the United States are quite unfamiliar with the cultures of China and China, but it is through their mothers that they gradually approach the cultures of China and China in emotion and consciousness. Although they think that the cultures of China and China, like their mothers, still have many defects and even ugly aspects, many of them finally agree with their mothers, the ancient land of China and the long-standing culture of China, and their identity as China people. As Wu Jingmei, the heroine of The Joy Luck Club, one of China's four daughters, said, "I felt a little strange when our train left the Hong Kong border and entered Shenzhen, China. I can feel the skin on my forehead shaking, the blood all over my body running along a brand-new channel, and the bones all over my body aching. This is an ancient and familiar pain. I think what my mother said before is right,' I' is becoming a China person. "

Both The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife end with a reconciliation between mother and daughter, which clearly reflects the author's creative intention. In The Kitchen God's Wife, the mother finally told her daughter all the historical secrets of pain, humiliation and sin, and these memories have already become a heavy burden for her mother. The mother wants to escape the entanglement brought by this memory all her life, and she is even more reluctant to let her daughter escape this painful torture after knowing the truth of her life. Finally, the mother tells the memory of history, hoping that her daughter can tolerate everything in the past and realize the understanding and reconciliation between mother and daughter. What is particularly meaningful is that Amy Tan named the last chapter of The Joy Luck Club, that is, the chapter where Chinese mothers and American daughters began to reconcile, as Mother of the Western Sky, which means that in the eyes of American daughters, Chinese mothers eventually changed from a "terrible banshee" to a "sacred queen", from a nagging housekeeper to a Guanyin bodhisattva who helped all beings.

Mother is the carrier of China's cultural tradition, the intermediary between history and memory, and the bridge between the past and the present. China's cultural tradition continues through her mother, and her history and memory are reconstructed through her. Through the inheritance and continuation of their mothers, the daughters have realized a correct attitude towards cultural conflicts, and tolerated the humiliation and pain of the past through their understanding and acceptance of their mothers. "Everyone in China goes to the world, bearing the gift of this history. Accept history in rebellion and understand rebellion from the pursuit of history. " This is the profound cultural connotation and symbolic significance of the mother image in Amy Tan's novels.