Going Beyond The Binary Oppositions

Amy Tan is a Chinese American writer and The Joy Luck Club is one of her representative works. It is also a work about ethnics and culture. The novel focuses on four pairs of mothers and daughters with different cultural characteristics, different educational and cultural backgrounds, which lead to misunderstandings and conflicts between them. This makes them be opposing parties who are contrary to each other and who don't have the tendency to give in though they have the same blood and genes in their individual bodies. Amy Tan also used oppositions between them to explore the specific mother-daughter relationship in the novel. But further discussion is that cultural differences, which are aroused by mother-daughter oppositions, and explores the attitudes toward Chinese native culture or Chinese traditional culture from the opposite parties in order to find whether they have the Chinese cultural identity or not. In other words, it is about the individual cultural identity. The focus of this paper is to explore Amy Tan's Chinese cultural identity.The pair of binary oppositions between mother and daughter is the main plot of the novel, and it is the starting point for author of this thesis to analyze the novel. The author attempts to analyze and explore the nature and cultural origin of the opposite parties by discussing binary oppositions of structuralism. We will try to find that Amy Tan's cultural identity and map out her inner tendency about cultural identity.This paper is composed of three parts, which are introduction, body and conclusion. Among them, the introduction summarizes the major criticism about The Joy Luck Club at home and abroad, and it briefly introduces the content of the novel, life story of Amy Tan, the research approaches applied in the paper and the author's attitude toward The Joy Luck Club. The second chapter analyzes the different attitudes toward education and marriage through the two opposite parties, which shows that the Chinese traditional culture or the Chinese native culture is collectivism. The third chapter focuses on writing techniques by analyzing the pair of binary oppositions in languages, which implies that Amy Tan shows her interest in Chinese characters. It discusses the important role of the specific plot arranging through"Space-time"theory introduced by Book of Changes in order to test Amy Tan's Chinese cultural identity. The conclusion delivers the ideology"Peace is precious"advocated by Confucianism which is the way to develop harmony by seeking common ground while reserving difference."Harmony between the heaven and man"is Amy Tan's cultural identity, which proves that Amy Tan's identification with Chinese native culture.