Chinese-American Women between East and West in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Abstract

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.