摘 要

华裔美国文学由美国华人的移民历史而产生，随着20世纪70年代一大批优秀的华裔作家涌现文坛，处于边缘化的华裔美国文学开始登上主流美国文学的舞台，并逐渐被认可。在华裔美国文学中，身份认同问题作为一个永恒的主题一直被反复提及。

谭恩美作为一名具有双重文化身份的美籍华裔作家的典型代表，在1989年发布的处女作长篇小说《喜福会》一经面市便产生热烈反响。该小说描写了四位性格、命运各异，抛弃国难家仇，移居美国的中国女性，以及她们出生并成长在美国的女儿们间的情感故事。国内目前有众多关于《喜福会》的相关研究。其主要解读的是小说中的母女关系，很少关注美籍华裔对其身份的认同冲突与和解。而本论文的创新点在于：第一，联系现实，揭示了两代美籍华裔关于身份认同的问题并不是老问题，而是新的而且紧急的问题。第二，作者提出了关于如何和解身份认同冲突的三个方法。

本文分为五个部分。第一部分对作者谭恩美及《喜福会》作简短介绍。第二部分分别描述书中展现的四对母女之间关于身份认同的冲突。第三部分从个人、家庭、社会三方面分析构成母女两代华裔冲突的原因。第四部分描写如何能解除冲突达到和解。最后一部分是全文总结，指出《喜福会》在现实中对美籍华裔身份认同的影响。

关键词：《喜福会》；身份认同；美籍华裔；冲突；和解

Abstract

Chinese American literature is generated by the history of Chinese American immigrants. With the emergence of a large number of outstanding Chinese American writers in the 1970s, marginalized Chinese American literature began to enter the stage of mainstream American literature and was gradually recognized. In Chinese American literature, issues over identity have been repeatedly mentioned as an eternal theme.

Amy Tan, as a representative of a dual cultural identity of the Chinese American writers, published her saga novel The Joy Luck Club as a maiden work in 1989. The novel describes the emotional stories between the four Chinese women with different characters and different fates that abandoned the national calamity and family hatred and moved to the United States and their daughters who were born and grew up in the United States. There are a large number of researches on The Joy Luck Club. Those researches focus on the relationship between mother and daughter, paying little attention to conflict and reconciliation between two generations of Chinese Americans over identity. This paper has two innovative points. One is the paper contacts reality and announces that conflict between two generations of Chinese Americans over identity is not an old issue but also a new and urgent issue. Another one is that the author put forward three ways of reconciliation.

This paper consists of five parts. The first part is a brief introduction of the author Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club. The second part describes the conflicts over identity in the relationships of the four mothers and daughters in the book. The third part analyzes the causes of the conflict between two generations from three aspects: person, family and society. The fourth part explains how to resolve the conflict to reach a settlement. The final part is a summary of the full text, pointing out the realistic meaning of The Joy Luck Club over identity of Chinese Americans.

Key Words: The Joy Luck Club；identity；Chinese American；conflict；reconciliationContents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 About Amy Tan 1

1.2 About The Joy Luck Club 2

1.3 Layout of the Paper 3

2 Manifestations of Identity Conflict 5

2.1 The Chinese Mothers' Identity Conflict 5

2.2 The American Daughters' Identity Conflict 8

3 Causes of Identity Conflict 11

3.1 Personal Reasons 11

3.2 Family Problems 12

3.2.1 Marriage 12

3.2.2 The View of Family Ethics 13

3.3 Social Causes 13

3.3.1 The View of Face 13

3.3.2 The View of Social Intercourse 14

3.3.3 Friendship 14

4 Ways for Achieving Reconciliation 15

4.1 Carrying Forward the Traditional Chinese Culture 15

4.2 Learning and Absorbing the Essence of Western Culture 16

4.3 Enhancing the Communication and Cooperation between East and West 18

5 Conclusion 20

References 22

Acknowledgments 24

Conflict and Reconciliation between Two Generations of Chinese Americans over Identity in The Joy Luck Club

1 Introduction

1.1 About Amy Tan

Amy Tan is a Chinese American writer who was born on February 19, 1952 in Oakland, California. Santa Clara, California is the place where she grew up in and received primary and secondary education there. Her parents were the first generation of immigrants from China to the United States in the 1940s. In 1968, her father died and she moved to Switzerland with her mother. They returned to California in 1969. She once studied in a medical school, but later gave up. Then she turned to study English and linguistics at San Jose State University, and received bachelor's and master's degrees in 1973 and 1974 respectively. After graduation, she married with Couis De Mattei. In 1975, Amy Tan received a full scholarship from PhD. at the University of California-Berkeley, where she abandoned her second year of her doctoral studies and served as a consultant in a training association towards those who learn a language dully. In 1987, she returned to China with her mother to visit relatives and search for a family's geographic roots.

Amy Tan accepted the mainstream culture of the United States, which gave her a sense of psychological superiority and made her always have an attitude to look down upon or even misunderstand Chinese traditional culture. But at the same time, Amy Tan also demonstrated the excellent side of Chinese traditional culture, and spread it to the western society. In an interview, Amy Tan said that those Chinese American parents wanted their children to live in the United States, but also to maintain the Chinese tradition. However, as the second generation of immigrants, Amy Tan is willing to take the initiative to integrate into the American culture, accepted by the strong mainstream culture. Between 1981 to 1987, Amy Tan became a journalist, an editor of medical journals and a freelance writer who wrote about commercial science and technology. Since 1985, she had a strong interest in novel creation so she participated in the writer training camp and began to publish short stories and proses. Amy Tan's novels are autobiographical because she is good at describing the subtle emotions and exploring the relationships between mother and daughter. She often sets Chinese American women as the protagonist. These Chinese women not only have to face the problem of racial identity, but also confront the gap with their parents in the cultural identity. These are inextricably linked to the growth environment of Amy Tan.

The Chinese image, formed from profound social and cultural reasons, is a typical image of Chinese American literature in Amy Tan's novels. Her mother told her many stories about China, so Amy Tan's understanding of China was also more from her mother, family and the Chinese community, which led to her inevitable understanding errors on the Chinese society. It can be said that Amy Tan is a typical "American Born Chinese", which explains why Amy Tan often used American way of thinking and standard of value to look at China. The mainstream society of the United States towards Chinese people will inevitably affect Amy Tan's view. When Amy Tan looks at China with the psychology of American, it will produce all kinds of misreading of China. At the same time, as a minority of the United States, Amy Tan is deeply dissatisfied with racial discrimination in the United States, and she often portrayed China as an ancient cultural country or fantasy of Utopian, in order to gain recognition of the mainstream American society. Built on her own needs, Amy Tan integrates the Chinese images and shapes the image of China. Tan's novels reproduce Chinese images with her unique cultural identity and survival experience. Although the image of China has numerous distortions, it satisfies the psychological expectation of the West and promotes communication between Chinese and American culture.

1.2 About The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan's most well-known work is The Joy Luck Club, which reflects the cultural differences in two generations by describing the story between mothers and daughters. It is in such a conflict that the mothers and daughters in the story understand that they are not pure Chinese or Americans, but are Chinese Americans who are compatible with both Chinese culture and American culture.

The novel, through the theme of mother-daughter relationship, shows that the contradiction between mother and daughter is finally resolved. This not only shows the historical inevitability that the Sino-US culture from conflict to reconciliation, but also embodies the author's hope that determine their cultural identity desire through the Sino-US cultural communication and fusion. In the novel, the four mothers had experienced hardship in China, but they all overcame multiple difficulties relying on tolerance, doughty, hard working, independence, smart and other qualities, which helped them reborn in the soup and began a new life in the United States. However, there were not any easy life waiting for them. They were excluded from the mainstream of the United States society and felt troubled with real life because they were abroad.

Deeply influenced by Chinese culture, they were incompatible with the mainstream culture of the United States. In order not to be rejected from the mainstream culture of the United States, they had to repress the personality that was formed on the basis of Chinese culture. Unlike their mothers, daughters grew up in the United States in such a situation that they learned Chinese culture from their mothers but also accepted the United States culture from the society they grew up in. They are the same as Americans in terms of language, behavior, ideas, values and other aspects, so they always have tension with their mothers who grew up with traditional Chinese culture. The end of the novel describes Jingmei changed her attitude from not understanding her mother's care and thought to understanding and finally decided to go to Shanghai to resume their relationship with her long-lost twins sisters in order to complete the mother's lifelong wish. Hereto, the theme of the conflict between mothers and daughters gets sublimation; mothers and daughters' collision have been communicated and understood. It shows the cultural fusion with huge conflicts between Chinese and American.

1.3 Layout of the Paper

The paper consists of five parts. The beginning of the paper gives brief introductions about the author Amy Tan and her most famous novel: The Joy Luck Club. This part focuses on introducing the environment Amy Tan grew up and the education she got to explore why she as a Chinese American wrote so many books about those immigrates who moved to America to start a new life but had conflicts with their America born children. As for the introduction of the novel, the theme and profile of it are presented.