Cultural Conflicts And Concord

Amy Tan, a famous Chinese American authoress, was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. In 1987, she finished The Joy Luck Club based on her grandmother and mother's experiences and finally published it in 1989. Not only does she have the profound understanding about American culture, but she also gets an insight into Chinese traditional culture. Her unique living experience has become the abundant resource of literature imagination and creation, forming her particular angle and style.The thesis is a tentative attempt at a cultural comparative study of The Joy Luck Club. The comparative study of Western and Chinese traditional cultures has been for a long time. Since the end of 19th century, many Chinese scholars have been analyzing the different features of Chinese and Western cultures. And in USA, cultural anthropologist Edward Hall has also analyzed the features of Western and Chinese traditional cultures by High-Context and Low-Context theory. It is the writing purpose and significance of the thesis to explain the cultural conflicts and concord by the cultural comparative study.The thesis is divided into five chapters. In chapter one, the writer makes a brief introduction to the research background, Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club. In chapter two, besides literature review, research objective and significance, the writer mainly introduces methodology: the comparative study between Chinese traditional culture and Western culture and High-Context and Low-Context theory by Edward Hall. In chapter three, the writer analyzes the conflicts in The Joy Luck Club in detail. And the thorough analysis is conducted from the two aspects: representation and causes. In The Joy Luck Club, conflicts represented from mother-daughter relationship, are caused not only by the generation gap but by different characteristics of Western and Chinese traditional cultures. And different manners on expressions and different understanding on personal and family values make the conflict especially abrupt.In chapter four, the writer analyzes in detail the concord in The Joy Luck Club, which is represented by representation and causes. The cultural concord in The Joy Luck Club is mainly represented by the amicable settlement of mothers and daughters and exploration on personal identity. Since there is much complementation between Western and Chinese traditional cultures, the complementary analysis of the comparative method could explain why daughters, as they grow up, in The Joy Luck Club gradually accept the Chinese culture which they originally resisted. In Chapter five, the writer arrives at the conclusion that the process from collision to reconciliation of mother-daughter relationship provides a better explanation for the comparative method of Western and Chinese traditional cultures.