The Joy Luck Club is a novel written by Chinese American author Amy Tan. It is a lifetime story that four pairs of Chinese-born mothers and American-born daughters are involved. The Joy Luck Club firstly made a hot research trend in American academic world not long after its publication. It drew favor of main American critical circles and many Chinese American females. Since 1990s, the study on The Joy Luck Club abroad began to treat the novel as marginal literature. There are various studies on this novel. In 1994, Ben Xu published "Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club". Later in 1998, Zenobin Mistri published "Discovering the Ethnic Name and The enealogical Tie in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club". Besides researches from identity perspective, in 1991, Frank Chin stated in his work The Big Aiiieeee! that what Amy Tan depicted in her novel about China and Chinese American are all the fruit of white racist's imagination, which also provides a new direction to probe in. Domestic research on The Joy Luck Club are mainly explore from the cultural perspective(such as mother-daughter relationship, family relationship, cultural identity). These studies can be broadly divided into two categories: one is based on the background of Chinese American literary studies, which put Amy Tan as a representative figure. The most typical one is Zhang Ziqing's "Sino-American Cultural Exchange in Chinese American Literature" published in 1996 and Amy Ling published Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry in 1990. The other is based on one of her works as a specific discussion object, and a variety of thematic studies from various perspectives are launched. In recent studies, cultural identity and racial politics are highly concerned. Xu Shasha’ s "Reconstruction of Cultural Identity of the Chinese American Mothers in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." and Cao Hualing’ s "Binary Oppositions and Reconstruction:Racial Politics in The Joy Lcuk Club from Spatial Perspective." in 2017 can best demonstrate these trends. All in all, common perspectives on the study of this novel are from culture, politics, relationship between mother and daughter, feminism, identities also in the angle of Orientalism respectively, while researches append cultural hegemony remain unobtrusive. The combination of these two provide a more pluralistic perspective for the study of The Joy Luck Club. Orientalism is a deeply rooted and long-standing idea and discourse tradition in Western civilization. In Orientalism, Edward Said systematically expounds the post-colonial theory, that is, using the binary opposition expression system, to distinguish the characteristics of the East and the West in advance, and then label them essentially, so that the differences between the East and the West are deeply rooted. Chinese people are described as the sexist, oppressive, mysterious, inscrutable, exotic, and savage racial Other in the Joy Luck Club. This paper focuses on the use of the post-colonial theory in Orientalism, supplemented by the image of Other to analyze the image of Chinese women represented by Chinese-born mothers in the Joy Luck Club.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

This paper focuses on the use of the post-colonial theory in Orientalism, supplemented by the image of Other to analyze the image of Chinese women represented by Chinese-born mothers in The Joy Luck Club. This paper is divided into four parts. In first part, it introduces Said' s Orientalism theory firstly, emphasizing on the post-colonialism theory and the expression system of binary opposition. Secondly, the image of the Other and functions of it are expounded. The second part introduces the writer Amy Tan about her life experience and writing background of the Joy Luck Club in detail. This paper attempts to demonstrate that Chinese American writers, who are influenced and overlooked by the strong American culture, will undoubtedly cater to the Western readers to create "mysterious, backward, inferior" Oriental "Other" images in order to gain the mainstream social identity. The third part is text analysis. Language and conduct descriptions of these four mothers in the novel are quoted amply. The traditional Confucian ethics, moral concepts and religious beliefs behind them are also analyzed. The fourth part combines theories with demonstrations to elaborate the Orientalism displayed by Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club under cultural hegemony and draw the conclusion.

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