The Eternal Mother-daughter Love: Symbolism In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

In the past thirty years, Chinese American literature has gained growing attention through the endeavor of the Chinese American writers.The focus of this thesis is on the famous Chinese American writer Amy Tan and her masterpiece The Joy Luck Club (1989), which became an immediate success after its publication and was enthusiastically received by critics and the public. Thanks to the success of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan became one of the most beloved and successful international best-selling writers.This thesis attempts to analyze mother-daughter relationship by presenting the conflicts, communication and integration between the Joy Luck mothers and their American-born daughters from the perspective of symbolism. Tan puts her own personal experience into the context of all Chinese Americans. Tan writes about family issues and mother-daughter conflicts, but she extends family conflicts into cultural ones, in which the family issues and mother-daughter relationship are symbolized and allegorized, and the novel holds more symbolic meanings with deeper cultural implication.This paper illustrates symbolism in the novel from the following three aspects: symbolic implication of the title: the Joy Luck Club; symbolism in themother-daughter relationship: conflicts------the swan and chess game, understandingand reconciliation------the East, the jade pendant and Jing-mei's journey to China; andsymbolic meaning of the characters------Jing-mei and Mother.Through a detailed interpretation of Tan's use of symbolism, this thesis comes to a conclusion that by employing symbolism, Tan attributes great significance to the conflicts, communication and final reconciliation between Chinese mothers and Americanized daughters, which connotes the relationship between Chinese culture and American culture. Thus, through a happy ending, Amy Tan successfully conveys to readers her final intentions that in the age of globalization, the ancient China and the young America can eventually reach mutual understanding, communication, and trust in spite of the differences in culture, history and political system.