Conflicts·Deconstruction·Reconstruction

The publication of The Joy Luck Club in 1989 has established Amy Tan's important position in American literature and made her a famous Chinese American writer. The success of this novel owes not only to the author's vivid depiction of the conflicts between the Chinese immigrant mothers and their Americanized daughters, which also take place almost in all the other non-European immigrant families, but also to the deconstructive ideas that it suggests. Therefore, exploring the causes beneath the conflicts and explicating the deconstructive ideas become meaningful and practical. Many critics agree with that it is different cultural backgrounds that mainly cause the conflicts, but most of them only confine their research to the surface of the cultural conflicts. The author of this thesis finds the exact causes beneath mother-daughter's conflicts, that is, both the mother and daughter's cultural centralism, or called ethnocentrism, and explicates the deconstruction of mother and daughter's cultural centers, furthermore, she analyses the reconstruction of the harmonious relationship between them. The thesis is made up of the four following parts: In the first chapter the author introduces the conflicts between the Chinese immigrant mothers and the Americanized daughters. In the second chapter the author finds the main causes that lead to the conflicts: the cultural centralism, or called ethnocentrism, of both the mothers' and daughters'. In the third chapter the author explicates how the two centers are deconstructed. In the fourth chapter the author reveals the possibilities of the reconstruction of the mother-daughter's harmonious relationship and shows the process of it. From the analysis in the above chapters, it is concluded that conflicts in intercultural communication are sure to arise among people who take the ideas of cultural centralism; the so-called centers are sure to be deconstructed; only when people from different cultures are ready to understand and respect the other's culture and communicate well can they establish harmonious relationship.