Appreciation of Joy Luck Club's Works

Theme of The Joy Luck Club: Facing the hegemonic discourse of American racial discrimination and American mainstream culture, China women build up self-confidence, get rid of inferiority and realize their inner return.

Inferiority is only the superficial imbalance of women in China under racial discrimination, and the deep reason is the loss of ethnic identity. Encouraged by their mother, China's daughters, caught in the cracks, finally established their self-confidence and got rid of their inferiority complex. In the text, although the images of several China daughters fall into the stereotype, they are the original images of Xinhua people based on real life, which is a kind of "anti-discourse" in itself.

Half of the memories of the first generation of China women stayed in China. They don't understand the American language, so it is difficult for them to integrate into American society. They have to pin all their hopes on their daughters to realize their "American dream".

The second generation of Chinese women who were born in the United States and received western ideological and cultural education could not get rid of the identity of Chinese differentiation and lived in the cracks. They are of China descent, but they were born in the United States. In order to realize their dream of becoming Americans, they strive to get rid of the rigid image of Chinese Americans and deliberately create some positive images of China in their works, but at the same time they embody China culture, which is actually the embodiment of a series of conflicts and contradictions caused by cultural differences between China and the West.

The American dream of the first generation of women

The first generation of China women described in The Joy Luck Club experienced all kinds of sufferings brought by poverty, war and feudalism. They are over middle-aged, have no language skills, and engage in some low-manual labor in Chinatown. They came to the United States with the pain of war and the memory of feudal oppression in old China. Because they don't know English and face different cultures, they are at a loss in the mainstream white society. Only by playing mahjong can they express their repressed feelings. In American society, whites as the mainstream are further marginalized, and their voices are not accepted by mainstream culture, so they can only remain silent most of the time.

It's hard to escape from a miserable life. Those mothers in America have given their next generation great hope. They prefer to endure the pain they have experienced alone and never mention their experiences in China to their daughters. In order to integrate their daughter into American society faster, although they speak poor English, they encourage their daughter to speak English instead of Chinese, hoping that her daughter can get ahead and become a real American in the future. But it is precisely because of their tragic experience that they placed too much hope on their daughters, which caused them great pressure, made them rebellious and began to alienate their mothers for a long time. Daughters never really knew their mother. A mother's dream is pinned on her daughter, whose alienation makes her dream out of reach. Mothers come to America with different pasts, find their own world in their own unique way, work hard for their dreams and let hope spread.

The American dream of the second generation of women

The second generation of China women were born in the United States. They received a good western education, and their thoughts were open and free, but because they lived in a family in China, it was difficult to get rid of the shackles of their parents' traditional feudal thoughts. In order to better integrate into the mainstream American society, they married whites, but due to cultural differences, it is difficult to get a good marriage. They live in the gap between Chinese and American cultures and are separated from their mothers. They are eager to find a balance between China traditional culture and western mainstream culture, and seek to build a harmonious society with multi-cultural integration. As the second generation of women in China, on the one hand, they constantly hear their mothers' demands for restoring traditional culture, on the other hand, they want to occupy a place in the mainstream culture and not be marginalized. They are sandwiched between two cultures, and their American dream is to determine their American identity. American culture is the cultural environment they accepted from birth, but living in the family mode of China, they think that China culture is the culture of other countries. As mentioned in The Joy Luck Club, "If you show one face, you have to sacrifice another." It embodies the subjective division of Chinese Americans. Although Gong Linda always thought she was from China, people in China thought she was a foreigner after returning home. Sadly, in the eyes of Americans, Chinese Americans are the other, but in the eyes of China people, they are also the other, and their identity is in an embarrassing situation under the double gap between the two cultures.

The second generation of China women think that it is difficult for their mothers to adapt to American society, because their thinking mode is still China's. Dissatisfaction with the mother is also reflected in many specific events. When they rebelled against their mother, they actually took the initiative to deny China and wanted to be pure Americans. Judging from the marriage choices of the daughters in The Joy Luck Club, they all choose white people as their husbands, which is an effort to pursue their dream of becoming real Americans.

As the second generation China women born in the United States, Amy Tan and other contemporary China women writers are highly educated and influenced by western culture, but at the same time they have different ethnic identities from the mainstream culture, which makes them feel confused and confused. They are "women caught between two worlds". "The confusion and pursuit of cultural identity is an inherent feature of Chinese women writers' texts, which is the similarity of their texts. "They don't have a good relationship with their mother, and they want to get rid of the traditional backward feudal thoughts in old China and fully integrate into the mainstream white society. Mother is the representative of traditional culture in China, and daughter is the advocate of western culture. The contradiction and conflict between mother and daughter represent the collision of two cultures. When the daughters face the mainstream American culture, the indelible China culture has always influenced them. Through the understanding of their mother's past, the relationship between mother and daughter has changed from conflict to integration, which represents the dissolution and integration of Chinese and western cultures, but also repairs the relationship with white husbands, reflecting the author's desire to seek self-integration in Chinese and western cultures in order to establish his ideal national and cultural identity. Although it was difficult, at the end of the story, the mother and daughter resolved the contradiction through mutual understanding. Harmonious mother-daughter relationship unifies the "American dream" of the mothers of the first generation of Chinese women and the daughters of the second generation of Chinese women, that is, while maintaining the tradition of China, they can integrate into American society faster and better and enjoy harmonious family and social relations.

The four mothers in The Joy Luck Club-Wu Suyun, Xu Anmei, Gong Linda and Yingying St. Claire-experienced completely different past events, but they all fled their motherland in that war-torn era, and resolutely set foot on a completely strange country with uneasy and vague expectations, and stubbornly rooted themselves in the land of the United States, hoping to bear the happy fruit of life. Their lives, after they set foot on American soil, all reached the same goal. Mothers with different personalities easily recognized each other and set up the Joy Luck Club full of China meaning, which kept a trace of their own warmth under the cold and unpredictable sky in a foreign country. They are all "China women" rooted in the United States. The four mothers gradually learned to accumulate the wisdom of survival in hardships, and finally they were able to walk through life strongly. They gave their daughter the unfinished business of the United States and the dream that will be cherished forever in reincarnation. Together with the true meaning of life they cast with their lives, they told their daughter to catch the only white feather no matter what.

From Linda and Yingying's unfortunate marriage and life experience, we can see that although women are still in a subordinate cycle and become victims of a patriarchal society, they reveal that women's self-awareness has awakened, and they have begun to rebel and fight for their status in their own way. Under the traditional cultural system of China, women are subordinate to men. However, when the old China was trampled on, they were not as obedient as the local women and became poor victims of the patriarchal culture. They still have their mother's unique perseverance, but this perseverance has been given a new direction, that is, they are no longer just passive obedience and patience, but indomitable to find a new way out in adversity. Symbols in novel creation aim at expressing invisible thoughts hidden behind visible things and phenomena, that is, expressing spiritual secrets and thoughts behind things. Image is a subjective and objective complex with perceptual discourse as the shell. In the three components of a novel, namely plot, characterization and background, image is often a part of the background. In the same work, if an image appears repeatedly, it will accumulate its own symbolic weight.

mahjong

In The Joy Luck Club, some metaphorical symbolic images appear many times. Although their metaphorical symbolic meanings are different, their directions are basically the same. They are like bright or dark beams, focusing on one focus at the same time, that is, the deep meaning of the work. In the novel, a very important symbolic image is mahjong. The title of the novel "The Joy Luck Club" is the name of a mahjong club, which was originally founded in Guilin by Wu Suyun, one of four mothers. At that time, the Japanese army marched into Guilin on a large scale. In the shadow of the war, Wu Suyun and three other women who escaped from the enemy-occupied areas took turns to host regular parties, which they called the Joy Luck Club. They talk about all kinds of interesting things while playing mahjong, and try their best to cook all kinds of delicious food at every party, so as to gain joy and spend a hard time, and hope to make good luck and express their prayers and expectations for life.

1949, when Wu Suyun set foot on the land of San Francisco with the dream of a new life, she didn't expect the new environment to meet new challenges. The humbleness and aphasia of Chinese in American history made her the "other" in the eyes of white people from the beginning. In this case, the instinct of survival is put on the agenda, and they urgently need to know who they are, while the past has become the only reliance for them to know themselves and survive, and memory has become the only way to return to the past. In this case, Wu Suyun and the Xu, Gong and Sheng families in the same situation set up the second Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club inherited the tradition of holding the first Mahjong Club in turn, having regular meetings and banquets, and also talking about family and investment. The Joy Luck Club is a memory of the past reconstructed by Wu Suyun, a reminder of her unyielding memories when she was young, and provides them with a bond closely linked with the past, which is the traditional culture of China and China that they can never return to. They get together for decades to play mahjong, indulge in eating and drinking, and talk about everything-tirelessly, always talking about China until those stories almost become myths.

For mothers, the Joy Luck Club is a very important party, but for daughters, they are just confused and puzzled. When Wu Jingmei was a child, she thought that the Joy Luck Club was just a mysterious and eccentric China society with special ceremonies, just like the Ku Klux Klan rally or the Indian ceremony before the war. Daughters of other mothers in the Joy Luck Club never pay attention to their mothers' parties. But since her mother died, Wu Jingmei heard the story of her mother told by her aunts at the Joy Luck Club, and finally understood her mother and realized her old dream.

The whole story begins with Wu Jingmei sitting in the east of the mahjong table, which is her mother's position, and ends when she returns to the east, which is China. This indicates that the world between mother and daughter has never been understood, from confrontation to reconciliation, from separation to inheritance, and it is also a journey for the daughter to return. It can be seen that The Joy Luck Club is not only an extension of mothers' past memories and spiritual continuity, but also a bridge connecting mother and daughter generations, past and present, east and west, and the beginning and continuation of their self-identity.

clothes

The traditional function of clothes is to keep warm, comfortable and beautiful. In this novel, clothing has become another important symbol-the symbol of cultural identity. "In Amy Tan's novels, clothing has two main functions: one is to show the blending and collision of cultures, and the other is to hide, escape or perform a disguised identity." When Wu Suyun was in Guilin, in order to avoid the Japanese invasion, she fled to Chongqing alone with a pair of twins to find her husband. I walked for a few days on the way to escape, carrying two babies on my shoulders and having diarrhea. I am exhausted and weak to the extreme. In desperation, I had to throw away my luggage. Finally, I really couldn't support it, so I left my twin daughters on the side of the road. After learning of her husband's death, she felt that she had lost everything and nothing, "except clothes and hope." It can be seen that for Wu Suyun, clothes are equal to hope.

1949 When Wu Suyun immigrated to the United States, he left China with only a broken suitcase, which contained a box full of beautiful silk clothes. After arriving in San Francisco, those glamorous clothes were completely unsuitable for her new life and had to be put away. Wu Suyun had to put on the old clothes given to her by the local refugee shelter group, but those "clothes were all American sizes and hung around her." In her eyes, silk dress is not only her hope to pursue a better life, but also her self-identity and self-value firmly based on China's traditional cultural value system, that is, her cultural identity. As soon as she stepped into the white world of America, she was immediately put on their clothes: "going to church", "attending classes" and "chorus practice". Just like those American clothes, they were large in size and not at all.

Chinese mothers' cultural identity in the United States has become rootless, losing the foundation of China, being unrecognized in the United States and being in a humble aphasia position. In the loss, in order to keep in touch with the past in the new environment, they had to set up their own political party, the Joy Luck Club, to maintain their cultural identity. At the party, they "all wore interesting Chinese clothes, stiff collars and embroidered flowers on their chests." This kind of clothes is too fashionable for real people in China, but it is too weird to wear at parties in the United States. "This shows that for mothers, clothes have shown the mixture, conflict and collision of two cultures.

Gu Yingying took her first photo in the United States when she came out from the Angel Island Immigration Bureau. She wore the traditional ankle-length cheongsam of China women, and an old-fashioned western-style coat with shoulder pads, a wide placket and big buttons of the same color. Gu Yingying's strange clothes mixed the elements of conflict between the East and the West. "This visual conflict reflects Gu Yingying's own ideological conflict. There are many examples in the novel to show that the dress of the characters shows a wrong identity. On the way to Tianjin with her mother, Xu Anmei found that her mother changed into a dress from top to bottom, and then she was changed into a big skirt from head to toe that she had never worn before. Later, when Amy arrived at her mother's mansion where the man danced lightly, she realized that dancing lightly was made by foreigners. He is very westernized and likes foreign goods, so she guessed that her mother dressed like this to please Qingwu. In fact, only in this way can she give Ann more protection and economic security.

food

Eating is a very important part of China culture. Eating is also a very important image in China women's literature. This may be related to the traditional culture of China. In China, the traditional role of women is to buy and prepare daily meals and food for the whole family. In The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan can be seen eating everywhere. "The image of food plays an important role in every independent narrative of the novel. It connects the past, the present and the future, maintains the relationship between family and two generations, shows the enjoyment of * * *-and provides a language code that helps to regain personal history in forgetting. Food enables mothers to communicate with their daughters in common language; Food is the emotional home of two generations. "

In the first story of the novel, the author established the connection between two generations and four families through eating. When Wu carefully prepared to replace her dead mother as a member of the Joy Luck Club, she remembered that her mother would host the next party. Because Aunt Gong Linda cooked a pot of red bean soup at the last party, and her mother Wu Suyun was a core member of the Joy Luck Club, Wu Jingmei planned to cook a pot of black sesame soup for them next time. The Joy Luck Club is a gathering for everyone to play mahjong and discuss stock investment, and it is also a feast for eating. At every party, four families should indulge in eating and drinking. At the wedding banquet attended by Wu Exquisitely, there were "a lot of food", including wonton, fried noodles, fried chop suey, roasted pigs, finger-like things with different fillings, and some "nutrients" that could not be named at all. While eating, everyone talked about interesting things and debated their own views.

At the end of the novel, when she returned to China beautifully, her first meal with her father, aunt and a lot of relatives in China was actually hamburgers, French pancakes, apple pie and ice cream, a real American fast food. A table of American fast food brought everyone together in China.

The image of eating allows mothers to find a support that can sum up past memories. When Gong Linda talked about her unfortunate marriage in the past, her narrative was interspersed with many memories of eating: she saw her fiance at a party eating red eggs, which is called full moon wine in China; On the first day when she entered Hong's home as a child bride, she began to stand at the small short table to help cut vegetables and cook. Every day at her husband's house, she ponders how to cook well to satisfy her mother-in-law and husband. After she married Tianyu, she would stew a chicken and cook chicken soup for her husband every morning, and cook Bazhen soup for her mother-in-law at night. When Gu Yingying was a child, the memory of Empress Yue Bai was also full of memories of various foods. She has an accurate memory of what Empress Yue Bai ate that night: a big basket of zongzi, apples, pomegranates and pears, pickles, bacon, moon cakes, fried almonds, shrimps and so on. In the memory of eating, there are some memories of fishing, killing chickens and cutting fish. Although Gu Yingying lived in California later, the memory of eating in China as a child has become an indispensable element in her whole life.

For Xu Anmei, food is a painful memory that connects her with her grandmother, that is, her mother-in-law. When Ann Mei was four years old, she was scalded by hot pot soup on the dining table. It was her mother-in-law who stayed with her all night and kept putting cold water on her hot neck to relieve the pain, which made Xiao Anmei sleep well. On the deathbed of her mother-in-law, Xiao Anmei saw her mother cut a piece of meat from her arm and put it in the soup she was cooking for her grandmother, hoping to treat her dying grandmother in such an ancient way. Here, mother's meat is not only an edible prescription, but also a kind of pain and the value it represents.

Eating has a cultural particularity, which distinguishes different cultures and generations and represents a culture. In order to get her mother to agree to her marriage with Ricky, Vivian decided to take Ricky to her mother's house for dinner. In China people's habits, anything important is usually solved at the dinner table. And there are countless exquisite and polite at the dinner table. Ricky is not from China. He knows nothing about these things. At the dinner table, Ricky's whole behavior was like a performance, which was terrible. Vivian thought, "I can't save him." Ricky bought French wine that Vivian's parents didn't drink at all; He can't use chopsticks, but he insists on using them. As a result, an eggplant with thick sauce fell out of his crotch. He refused to taste green vegetables; Instead of praising him, he criticized the food cooked by his hostess, Vivian's mother, and so on. He also called the two old people by their first names according to American custom. After dinner, Ricky felt that everything was fine, and Vivfrey's parents got along well with him. This symbolic image connects the past, the present and the future. It is a link between two generations and families, and a bridge between East and West. Based on her own experience, Amy Tan combined the East and the West with her unique cultural experience and ethnic identity, making The Joy Luck Club an excellent work combining Chinese and Western. The final reconciliation of the contradiction between mother and daughter in the works symbolizes the inevitable trend of the integration of eastern and western cultures. This is the road of reconciliation that Chinese-American writers have been looking for, and it expresses the good wishes of a new generation of Chinese-American people to tolerate Chinese and American cultures, learn from each other's strong points, and be harmonious and unified. In The Joy Luck Club, a variety of narrative techniques are used, among which the biggest highlight is the adoption of a unique technique-story ring. The whole work consists of four parts, each of which consists of sixteen independent narrative plots. Formally, the narrative plot is independent, and together it is the formation of a big story. The seemingly complicated layout clearly expresses the complicated relationship between the protagonists, and the description of the mother-daughter relationship is very touching.

The story in The Joy Luck Club closely follows the theme of mother-daughter relationship, showing great vitality. In her novels, Amy Tan puts China traditional women and their families in a big cultural background, clearly describes the inextricable relationship between mother and daughter, and gives readers a novel reading perspective.

Chapter Layout and Character Relationship of "Four Structures"

Amy Tan pays attention to harmony and balance in her writing, and her writing skills are unique. The Joy Luck Club is an epoch-making novel reflecting cultural conflicts. Amy Tan fully combines China's traditional Zhang Hui novels with the western "Four Seasons Theory" in writing skills, and uses the literary genre of story ring in the overall structure, showing the rich inner world of women in the works with delicate brushwork, which makes the images of four mothers and daughters in the works extremely vivid. The unique structural model expresses the mother-daughter relationship in four families and reflects the process from disharmony to harmony between Chinese and western cultures.

The text of The Joy Luck Club implies four different stages between the hero and his mother in four chapters. The first chapter, A Thousand Miles of Goose Feathers, mainly tells the early experiences of four mothers and the background of crossing the ocean. "Goose feather" symbolizes spiritual wealth and represents the spiritual concept left by the mother to her daughters.

There are many female images in The Joy Luck Club. Amy Tan, a female writer, consciously put Wu Jingmei in a more obvious position and became the representative image of her daughter. In the first and fourth chapters, Wu Jingmei's appearance is accompanied by her mother's story. In the second and third chapters of The Joy Luck Club, the heroine's daughter tells two short stories about herself, of which Wu Jingmei, as a representative, tells them once in each part of the story ring. It is these four short stories of Wu Jinglian that run through the whole novel that make the whole work have an obvious central theme, and all the stories revolve around this theme.

Through the expression of four pairs of mother-daughter relationship, the author clearly expresses the contradictions and conflicts between Chinese and western cultures. In the third chapter of the work, the daughters gradually understand and accept their mother's practice, and their attitude towards their mother has also changed greatly. The relationship between mother and daughter has been greatly improved. In the last chapter, Wu Jingmei became a brand-new Wu Jingmei because of her understanding of her mother and different cultures. The acquaintance with her twin sister finally made her feel different about China culture.

Mutual Understanding of Characters in "Four Structures" Model

The mother-daughter relationship of the protagonist in The Joy Luck Club is the basic driving force to promote the development of the whole "story ring" and all the stories in it. In the third part of the four structures, the daughter gradually grew up and the relationship between mother and daughter improved. A mother will never give up her daughter, and her daughter will always want to know her. When a daughter grows up, she always recalls her mother's deep and implicit maternal love. They tried to solve the problem with the knowledge and experience taught by their mother, and the result was unexpectedly good. The knowledge taught by their once extremely exclusive mother is extremely effective in reality. Through the description of these stories, the author expresses a deeper meaning: the daughter and the mother are always the same, and the daughter is the expression of the other side of the mother.

In the fourth part of the text, Wu Jingmei sat at the mahjong table of the Joy Luck Club instead of her dead mother. This process from east to east shows the inevitability of cultural estrangement, conflict and final integration.

Time flies. After years of career and marriage baptism and setbacks, the daughters finally understand their status and become mature. Their original concept has also changed. The mother's sternness they felt since childhood is actually a manifestation of self-protection. They gradually woke up and eased the contradiction between their daughter and mother. "Take-off" represents the integration between mother and daughter and the resolution of communication barriers.

Wu Jingmei, the protagonist, felt extremely guilty about the past after her mother died, regretting that she had not cherished and listened carefully to her mother's teachings in the past. Wu Jingmei returned to China to visit her twin sisters. When she stood on the land where her mother was born and hugged her twin sister, she really understood her mother's past words and expectations for the future. At this point, the cultural barriers and conflicts between the daughter and the mother really disappeared, and the two generations resolved the contradictions and moved towards integration, and finally got the return of the soul.