The Reconstruction Of Chinese American Female Self In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan is one of the most prominent among all the Chinese American writers. With her five bestseller works, The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001) and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), she not only enjoys the high compliments from the critics but also gains great popularity among common readers and her name becomes a household word throughout the United States.From the postcolonial and feminist perspective, this thesis intends to study the reconstruction of the identity of Chinese American women in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.According to Post-colonial theory, Women from the Third World countries are subject to double oppression. On the one hand, they are afflicted with racial discrimination in the mainstream country. On the other hand, they suffer from sexual prejudices. Living in hegemonic America, they are tortured by both White racism and patriarchal doctrines. Their life and existence are marginalized into oblivion. In The Joy Luck Club, both the mothers and the daughters have suffered self loss to some extent. However, the women characters in The Joy Luck Club are not willing to accept such a humiliating state in passivity. On the contrary, they themselves take the initiative to change this marginalized condition. In The Joy Luck Club, the mothers resort to their past memories for the empowerment of both their daughters and themselves. Accordingly, the daughters, after their failure in full assimilation into American culture, finally come to identify with their mothers, listening to their stories and embracing Chinese culture. In this manner, both the mothers and the daughters relocate their selves and reconstruct their ethnic and sexual identity.Furthermore, in The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan depicts different mother-daughter bonds between different generations. For the older generation, the mother-daughter bond is rooted in their blood. Even though there is frequent physical separation between mothers and daughters, the daughters' fond memory of their mothers can never be eliminated. The mother-daughter relationship of the younger generation is more complicated. Owing to different cultural backgrounds, there is long period of misunderstanding between mothers and daughters. It is after their frustration and disappointment in work and marriage that the daughters finally return to the motherline and identify with mothers as female allies. The daughters realize the omnipresence of patriarchy no matter where they are situated. Thus they begin to regard their mothers as female allies rather than simply mothers.What deserves our attention is the importance of mother-daughter alliance in the self-reconstruction on the part of both mothers and daughters. Amy Tan seems to remind the readers that the identification and communication between females is essential to their construction of identity in foreign lands.