CHINESE AMERICANS’ PARADISE LOST AND REGAINED
------ON CULTURAL IDENTITY IN AMY TAN’S THE JOY LUCK CLUB
by
Hu Ying
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Professor Wang Xiaoling
Shanghai International Studies University
November 2008
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank all the people who made this thesis possible.
My deepest appreciation goes to my supervisor, Dr. Wang Xiaoling, who provided
me with heartwarming encouragement and constructive criticism. I am very grateful for
her guidance and intellectual and emotional support during the development and
completion of this paper.
My deepest thanks go to my dear parents, who shared the long journey of my hard
work and have been patiently waiting for me to complete my work. I am grateful to my
mother for giving me all her love and support during long and tedious hours of writing. My
gratitude also goes to my father for all my life believing in me and encouraging me to be
my best. Finally, to my greatest source of inspiration for mothering---she changed my life
forever---thank you for being my daughter, Tongtong.
ii
ABSTRACT
In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the two generations of Chinese American women
live as minority people in the United States, where neither the immigrant mothers nor the
daughters can eschew dealing with the implications of their bicultural heritage. Both the
mother and daughter are confronted with the issue of identity.
“Paradise Lost” explores the identity issues of individuals caught between two, often
contradictory cultures: immigrant mothers’ loss of their original identity and Americanborn daughters’ resistance to their ethnic identity. Many conflicts exist between them. They
struggle between the Oriental beliefs and the Western values, the traditional culture and the
modern civilization. In the process of the conflict, they constantly search for their own
identity and position in society and try hard to inherit their cultural values.
“Paradise Regained” focuses on the second-generation Chinese American women’s
embracing their ethnic identity. It is the power of the mother-daughter bond that finally
helps the daughters to learn to appreciate their mothers and in fact their own heritage.
iii
Eventually they get connected with their ethnic cultures and realize that Chinese culture is
an integral part of their identity. Only the national is the universal. If one discards his home
culture, he will lose the sense of belonging.
The happy ending of understanding in the novel reflects the correct attitude in regard
to culture: inherit home culture, absorb new culture, find a balance in the cultural conflicts,
and link up and blend different cultures of multicultural context in an open-minded way.
Key words: Chinese American, cultural identity, Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
摘要
作为散居国外的少数族裔，谭恩美的作品《喜福会》中的母女都面临着如何看待
自己身份的问题。作为第一代移民母亲们虽身在异国，却无法抛弃与祖国的血脉亲情
而在美国出生的女儿们是在完全迥异的价值观和环境下成长起来的，并不得不亲身
承受两种文化与价值观的冲撞。小说中的母亲和女儿对各自的文化身份有着不同的态
度，在文化迁徙的过程中充满了对抗与矛盾，其间也有许多无奈，小说中的“失乐
园”突显无疑。两代华裔女性大多挣扎在东方信仰和西方的价值标准、传统文化与现
代文明之间的矛盾与冲突中，不断寻求自己的身份与位置，并努力传承自己的文化
价值。
随着全球经济的交流和美国社会文化多元化的发展以及年轻一代对自身身份的
重新认知，她们母女间的文化结合又永远不会中断，“复乐园”由此孕育而生。母女
间纽带的力量最终帮助女儿理解了母亲，同时也接受了自己的民族文化。惟有民族的
才是世界的，如果抛弃自己的民族文化就会失去归属感。
《喜福会》中理解与和解的大团圆结局，正体现了一种正确对待文化的态度：继承
母文化、吸收新文化，在文化冲突中找到平衡，以一种开放的态度在多元文化环境中
iv
沟通与融合。
关键词：华裔，文化身份，谭恩美，《喜福会》
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………..……ii
v
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..…..iii
摘要…………………………………………………………………………………….…..iv
Table of contents…………………………………………………………………….……..v
Introduction……………………………………………………………………..................1
Chapter One Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost in their cultural identity……….... 6
1.1 Issues of identity…………………………………………………………………....6
1.1.1 The connection between identity and representation…………………………6
1.1.2 The discursive and dynamic feature of identity………………………………7
1.2 Loss of cultural identity…………………………………………………………...10
1.2.1 Mothers’ loss of original identity……………………………………………10
1.2.2 Daughters’ resistance to their ethnic identity………………………………..13
1.3 Mother-daughter conflict in Paradise Lost………………………………………...19
1.3.1 Obstacle of language………………………………………………………...20
1.3.2 Gap of culture………………………………………………………………..22
Chapter Two Chinese Americans’ Paradise Regained in their cultural identity…...28
2.1 New cognition of cultural identity…………………………………………………28
2.1.1 Inescapable ethnic discrimination……………………………………...……28
2.1.2 Genetically Chinese……………………………………………………….…33
2.1.3 Multi-cultural background…………………………………………………..35
2.2 Mother-daughter bond in Paradise Regained……………………………………...37
2.2.1 Blood connections…………………………………………………………..38
2.2.2 Culture connections…………………………………………………………40
Conclusion……………………………………………………….……………………….42
Bibliography……………………………………………………….……………………..44
.
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Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
Introduction
A century and a half has passed since the beginning of Chinese American writing.
During this period, Chinese immigrants, especially intellectuals, went through some
extraordinary experiences in the American society. For most, their American life was
marked by the endless effort of searching for individual identity and cultural belonging.
As the descendants of a presumed “superior culture”, they felt China and Chinese culture
provided them with spiritual guidance as they lived in a strange country. At the same
time, however, belonging to that culture left them feeling inferior and rejected in a
society that was saturated with discrimination. This contradiction was demonstrated in
their writings and made the narratives more complicated than ever. The sense of pride
and the sense of humiliation, the sense of self-glorification and self-pity, recognition and
rejection all became co-existent elements of their story-telling. Their narratives that were
based on memory, folklore and family sagas were part of their efforts to preserve and
raise their own voice and dignity beneath the oppressive presence of mainstream culture.
In addition, their stories were a response to adopting a new perspective on and approach
to China while accelerating cultural assimilation.
The pressure on immigrants to assimilate to western culture informs much of
Chinese-American literature. When the old immigrant writers are still depicting how the
immigrants make every effort to adapt themselves to the mainstream culture in America,
the new-generation writers point out that the degree of assimilation is not the only
criterion of success. The characters in their novels go through the process from
completely resisting their marginal national culture and accepting the dominating
mainstream culture in the country they live to showing a little interest in and curiosity
about their own national culture. Chinese American writer Amy Tan’s novel The Joy
Luck Club reflects thoroughly this subtle change in attitude and concept.
Amy Tan stands as one of the most productive and most popular writers of
Chinese origin outside China in the last two decades or so. Her novels are all set in the
1
Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
United States and the main characters are often caught in the conflict between Chinese
and American cultures. Amy Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club, was published at a
time when baby boomer mothers had daughters of their own to understand. It’s less angry
in tone, but equally poetic painful and often funny. The novel garnered enthusiastic
reviews, “remaining on the New York Times bestseller list thirty-four weeks in hardcover,
which passed through twenty-seven reprints before Holt purchased the soft-bound rights
for $1.2 million. It flourished in paperback for nine months and abroad in twenty-five
languages. It won an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults award,
Bay Area Book Reviewers prize, and Commonwealth Club gold citation as well as
nominations for the Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a National Book
Critics Circle’s Best Novel. Joy Luck was also a finalist for the National Book Award and
a literary selection for the 1992-1993 Academic Decathlon, a national scholastic
competition for high school students.”1
In the novel, Amy Tan probes the problematic Chinese mother-American daughter
relationship in four separate stories of two generations of women: Suyuan Woo and Jingmei June Woo; An-mei Hsu and Rose Hsu Jordan; Lindo Jong and Waverly Jong; Yingying St. Clair and Lena St. Clair. The four mothers each tell two stories, one about their
life in China, and the other about their life in the U.S., mostly alluding to their relations
with their daughters. The four daughters each tell two stories, too, one about a growing
up experience in the U.S., and the other about their present life, mostly about their
marriage and career. Because Suyuan is dead at the beginning of the story, her stories are
told by her daughter Jing-mei. Though the eight characters are divided into four families
and given different names, the book itself is concerned more with a simple bifurcation
along generational lines: the Chinese mothers strive to instill American-born daughters
with an understanding of their heritage, yet also attempt to save them the pain they felt as
girls growing up in China; the daughters, on the other hand, often see their mothers’
attempts at guidance as a form of hypercritical meddling, or as a failure to understand
American culture, thus respond by attempting to further their mothers’ assimilation. The
1
Snodgrass，Mary. Amy Tan: A Literary Companion. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1998. p17.
2
Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
novel is not only about mother-daughter relationships, but further, and more importantly,
about the journey of second-generation Chinese American women as they attempt to
claim their identity through the critical understanding of their dual cultural makeup. In
fact, the mother-daughter dynamic plays a crucial role in the maturation of the daughters
by demonstrating and stressing the cultural barriers that exist between immigrant parents
and their American-born children.
They struggle between the Oriental beliefs and the Western values, the traditional
culture and the modern civilization. The communication barrier between mother and
daughter indicates not only the generational difference, but also cultural difference, with
older culture represented by mothers on the wane and new culture represented by the
daughters on the rise. This imbalance between the first world and the third world cultures
indicates the domination of and continuation of western colonial mentality, in which the
third world culture is placed at a disadvantage. Within the Chinese American families,
especially the first-generation and the second-generation immigrants, they have different
attitudes in regard to their cultural identity. Mothers adhere to their peculiar national
culture, concerned with transmitting some knowledge about the Chinese cultural heritage
to their American-born daughters and disappointed with their daughters who do not live
up to their expectations whereas daughters, caught between their mother’s expectation
and American reality, accept more of the dominating mainstream culture while laughing
at and discarding the dominated marginal culture represented by their mothers. The two
generations of Chinese American women live as minority people in the United States,
where neither the immigrant mothers nor the daughters can eschew dealing with the
implications of their bicultural heritage. In the process of the conflict, they constantly
search for their own identity and position in society and try hard to inherit their cultural
values. The mothers try to reconcile their Chinese pasts with their American presents and
the daughters attempt to find a balance between independence and loyalty to their
heritage. Through Tan’s delineation of both conflicts and connections between mothers
and daughters, she constructs a group of characters who, by negotiation and adaptation,
transcend their national, cultural, linguistic differences to reach new understandings and
accommodations with one another.
The novel draws inspiration from the writer’s family stories. Amy Tan was born in
3
Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
Oakland, California, in 1952. Reared in an insular home, she valued her family lineage,
“the tapestry of who created us in our past, our parents, our grandparents, and beyond”.2
Up close, the family circle was less amiable. Her off-center relationship with her mother
began in toddlerhood with listening in Mandarin and replying in English. Tan remarked,
“She raised me with all her fears and regrets. She hinted at great tragedies. She had so
much advice…and I didn’t want to listen.”3 Her parents, both Chinese immigrants, lived
in various towns in California before eventually settling in Santa Clara. When Tan was in
her early teens, her father and one of her brothers each died of a brain tumor within
months of each other. During this period, Tan learned that her mother had been married
before, in China. Tan’s mother had divorced her first husband, who had been abusive,
and had fled China just before the Communist takeover in 1949, leaving behind three
daughters, whom she would not see again for nearly forty years. The author later
revealed that assimilation required her to reject Chinese culture and embrace the
American milieu as her home culture. The violation of her mother’s viewpoint and values
caused constant clashes. Education in history classes that excluded the Chinese role in
World War II increased the distance that grew between Amy’s American generation and
their immigrant parents.
When Tan’s mother suffered from a serious illness, Tan resolved to take a trip to
China with her mother if she recovered. In 1987, after her mother returned to health, they
traveled to China, where Tan’s mother was reunited with her daughters and Tan met her
half-sisters. The fear of the old country disappeared as soon as Amy arrived in the
People’s Republic of China, where she felt distinctly at home. She explained, “When you
go to a country that’s the home of your ancestors, there’s more than the issue of
birthplace, there’s a geography that’s in essence spiritual”.4 The trip provided Tan with a
fresh perspective on her mother, and it served as the key inspiration for her first book,
The Joy Luck Club. She hoped to blend in with other Asians, but stood out in bright-hued
American fashions, jewelry, and makeup as well as self-assured carriage. She visited her
2
Kanner, Ellen. “From Amy Tan, a Superb Novel of Two Sisters, Two Worlds, and a Few Ghosts”. Bookpage,
Dec.1995. p3.
3
Kropf, Joan. “Finding Her Voice”. Daily News. Jan. 11, 1991. pE2.
4
Kanner, Ellen. “From Amy Tan, a Superb Novel of Two Sisters, Two Worlds, and a Few Ghosts”. Bookpage,
Dec.1995. p3.
4
Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
three half-sisters and created an instant family bond that changed her outlook. As the
warring sides of her ethnicity made peace, she felt complete for the first time.
With the development of global economy and multiculturalism, people have
realized the significance of the exchange and the blending of cultures, therefore, the
citizens of dual identities are paid much more attention to.
5
Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
Chapter One Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost
in Their Cultural Identity
1.1
Issues of identity
Identity is about how we define who we are. “Literally, both identity and the self
mean ‘the same as’. In cultural theory identity is used to describe the consciousness of
self found in the modern individual. The modern self is understood to be autonomous and
self-critical. The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel saw individualism, the right to
criticism and autonomy of action as the three main characteristics of modern subjectivity.
This self-reflexive aspect of identity means that, in the modern age, identity is
understood to be a project. It’s not fixed. The autobiographical thinking that characterizes
modern identity creates a coherent sense of a past identity, but that identity has to be
sustained in the present and remade in the future. The constant remaking of identity
reveals that the sense of self is to some extent an illusion, because the making of the self
requires a constant interaction with the not-self or non-identity: the external world.”5
1.1.1 The connection between identity and representation
5
Baldwin, E., Longhurst, B., Smith, G., McCracken, S., Ogborn, M. (eds). Introducing Cultural Studies. Beijing:
Peking University Press, 2005. p224.
6
Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
In Stuart Hall’s article, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, he points out that there is
nothing essential or inherent about identity: “Cultural identity is always constructed
through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of
identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the
discourses of history and culture. Not an essence, but a positioning”.6 What Hall
underlines here is the close connection between identity and representation either through
myth, memory, or narrative. He regards identity as an active representation or discourse
construction. There is never an identity that supersedes language.
1.1.2
The discursive and dynamic feature of identity
In the novel, there is no other way to understand the mothers other than through
the stories they tell, the mothers’ China narratives become essential in constructing
identities of the Chinese mothers. Ben Xu points out that the China narratives by the
Chinese mothers serve more discursive purposes than as an accurate depiction of China.
Echoing Hall’s emphasis on the discursive rather than referential nature of identity, Ben
Xu writes, “Our sense of what has happened to us is entailed not in actual happenings but
in meaningful happenings and the meanings of our past experience […] are constructs
produced in much the same way that narrative is produced. Identity, as well as the
implicated self-definition and self narrative, almost certainly will be activated from
memory”.7 What Xu points out here is that readers’ access to events in the past is not
through reliving the actual happenings but through the various narratives that are
constructed around the events. In other words, our understanding of history or meaning
depends upon how that history or meaning is constructed through narrative. Xu thus
argues that the mothers’ narratives are indispensable in helping their daughters to
understand who they were in the past. In her article, Malini Schuller makes a similar
argument. She writes, “For the American-born daughters, the Chinese past exists
discursively, in language, through the stories told about it by their mothers. Ethnic
origins, in other words, are always already complicated by representation”.8 To Schuller,
6
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick
Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. p395.
7
Xu, Ben. “Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” MELUS 19.1 (Spring 1994). p4.
Schuller, Malini Johar. “Theorizing Ethnicity and Subjectivity: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” Genders 15 (Winter 1992). p81.
7
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Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
there is no natural or essential ethnic origin but representation of it through mothers’
narratives. Yuan Yuan also argues that when the Chinese mothers’ narratives are reshaped
for the American context, they lose their referentiality and become instead self-reflective
narratives that serve the American daughters. China becomes less a geographical location
than “a cultural extraterritory that the mothers have created in order to construct the
subjectivity of their American-made daughters”.9
Take Suyuan’s narrative of her China story as an example. Jing-mei says she takes
her mother’s story as nothing but a fairy tale:
I never thought my mother’s Kweilin story was anything but a Chinese fairy tale. The endings
always changed. Sometimes she said she used that worthless thousand yuan note to buy a half-cup of
rice. She turned that rice into a pot of porridge. She traded that gruel for two feet from a pig. Those
two feet became six eggs, those eggs six chickens. The story always grew and grew.10
Jing-mei’s questioning of reliability of mother’s story questions the extent to
which the mother’s discourse can be trusted. Maybe they just invent stories according to
different occasions. Maybe they create stories just to teach their daughters moral lessons.
By emphasizing both the importance of the Chinese mothers’ narratives and the
subjective nature of their stories, Tan demonstrates what Hall argues about the
connection between identity and representation.
In this novel, Tan focuses on depicting Chinese women who are variegated in
family backgrounds, growing-up experiences, immigration histories, and motherdaughter relations.
The four mothers come from different parts of China and face various difficulties
as they grow up. Suyuan is from Shanghai and is married to a military officer. However,
the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s leads to the death of her husband and forces
her to abandon her children. She falls in love with Canning Woo when she is hospitalized
in Chongqing, and later they immigrate to the U.S. Lindo is from Taiyuan. Betrothed at
two through an arranged marriage, she is forced to work at her future husband’s house at
twelve to save her family from starvation caused by floods, but as she says, “I would
9
10
Yuan, Yuan. The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/Texts of Kingston and Tan.” Critique 40.3 (Spring
1999). p295.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam’s, 1989. p12.
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Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.”11 She devises a
way to escape her marriage and goes to the U.S. An-mei, from Ningpo, grows up
listening to grandma’s instruction on how girls should be obedient and follow directions.
Her stories about the pregnant and disobedient girls warn An-mei from an early age not
to deviate from the expected behavior for women. Ying Ying, from Wuxi, is the fourth
mother in the novel. Of the four mothers, she is from the wealthiest family and lives a
trouble-free and innocent life, but she is never free the patriarchal control of women’s
behavior. Her mother says to her when she grows up: “A boy can run and chase
dragonflies, because this is his nature. But a girl should stand still.”12
Thus it is clear
that the four mothers grow up dominated by patriarchal, misogynistic, and hierarchical
ideas on women. They are the victims of war, arranged marriage, orphanage and failed
marriage; however, they never bow to fate and try to challenge it. They come to the U. S.
with the hope of starting a new life, bringing with them the wonderful dreams, and their
identities are always ready to change in new situations. Yet these transformations of the
Chinese mothers come to them at a high price. Transcending their previous identities is
often a long and painful journey, particularly for women from the third world who often
live at the bottom of the social ladder.
In the article “Who Needs ‘Identity’?”, Hall argues against the concept of an
integral and unified identity. He prefers to use the term “identification”, the process to
achieve identity. He writes, “In contrast with the ‘naturalness’ of this definition, the
discursive approach sees identification as a construction, a process never completed--always in process”.13
He further writes that identities “are subject to a radical
historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation”.14 There
is an important idea that Hall explicates in the remarks: identity is forever subject to
change of situations. Once the material or power conditions shift, the representations of
identities will accordingly shift. In other words, cultural identity is not something fixed
and unchangeable, but “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the
11
Ibid, p53.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam’s, 1989. p70.
13
Hall, Stuart. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity. Ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du
Guy. London: Sage, 1996. p2.
14
Ibid, p4.
9
12
Chinese Americans’ Paradise Lost and Regained---On Cultural Identity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending
place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, and have
histories.
But,
transformation.”15
like
everything
which
is
historical,
they
undergo
constant
Hall’s concept of the discursive and dynamic identity helps readers
to see the change of identities of the characters in the novel.
1.2
Loss of cultural identity
The two generations of Chinese American women live as minority people in the
United States, where neither the immigrant mothers nor the daughters can eschew
dealing with the implications of their bicultural heritage. Both the mother and daughter
are confronted with the issue of identity. The diasporic immigrants living in the host
country suffer not only the physical displacement, but also psychological dislocation and
uncertainty.
1.2.1 Mothers’ loss of original identity
The immigration of the Chinese to America means the loss of the original identity.
The four Chinese mothers in the novel left China for San Francisco before liberation and
every one of them left part of their own in China forever. As immigrants, the Joy Luck
mothers had to give up a lifestyle that explained their very existence. They left behind the
places where they learned life’s lessons from their mothers, lessons they believed
essential to understanding life’s pitfalls. Deprived of any sense of belonging since they
are cut off from their homeland and yet feel ill at ease with regard to cultural belonging
in a new country, they live in an intersection of history and memory. One of the mothers
Ying-ying stayed in Angel Island Immigration Station for three weeks until they could
15
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, culture, difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford.
London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. p225.
10