Résumé:
Like many Chinese American writers, Amy Tan, occupies a significant position. Her novel The Joy
Luck Club marks a distinct growth of Asian American Literature. Based on Said’s book of Orientalism, this
work aims at analyzing the Chinese mothers’ domestic and racial discrimination in two different societies.
Besides, it explores the cultural conflict between different generations in the Chinese community in
America. The Chinese mothers want their American daughters to be more obedient and respectful to the
Chinese traditions. But, the daughters prefer to be American citizens rather than Chinese ones. Hence, they
find themselves struggling between Western modern life and the mothers’ opposing values. So, the mothers
were seen as the inassimilable “other” in the eyes of their westernized daughters. Amy Tan’s description of
the Chinese mothers as “other” leads her work to participate in the dominant American discourse of
Orientalizing Chinese culture. Her harsh description of the Chinese’s peoples, customs and traditions helps,
to some extent, to reinforce the Chinese mothers as the image of “Other” in the dominant culture.
