A Study Of Multiculturalism In The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan is a distinguished Chinese American writer, who has made a great contribution to Chinese American literature. Tan's first novel The Joy Luck Club is considered to be her most successful work, and has gained great popularity among popular readership as well as critics. Through an overall examination of the criticisms on The Joy Luck Club, we find that a great many critics are interested in studying Amy Tan's unique cultural identity, and approach the novel from cultural perspectives. Although quite a few critics advance that it is a cultural text, most of them only see cultural conflicts between Chinese and American cultures. Few discover evidence of cultural communication in the novel, let alone its multiculturalism. The present thesis is intended to justify that The Joy Luck Club is an embodiment of multiculturalism.The present thesis mainly includes two chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. The introductory chapter offers a brief introduction to Amy Tan and her works, as well as a research project based on a detailed analysis of its research background. Chapter Two concentrates on multiculturalism and Amy Tan's multicultural conception. The United States is a country consisting of multiple ethnic groups who have different cultural backgrounds. Its cultural hegemony of "melting pot" has gradually been replaced by multiculturalism with the increasingly frequent communication between different cultures in the 20^th century. Growing up in such a multicultural environment, Chinese American writers incorporate their multicultural conception into their writings, among whom Amy Tan is an outstanding representative. In Chapter Three, the study of multiculturalism in The Joy Luck Club is carried out from perspectives of Tan's creation of a mechanism for cultural negotiation, her image modeling, narrative strategies, and the theme of the novel. By creating the Joy Luck Club in the novel, Tan takes advantage of it as the mechanism for cultural negotiation for her characters. Besides, Tan destructs the stereotypes of Chinese and Chinese American women by modeling upright images of four immigrant mothers. The special narrative language and form are adopted as narrative strategies to construct multiculturalism. Tan's narrative language in the novel is a patois of Chinese and English, which displays the unique cultural identity of Chinese Americans. She frames the novel in the western cultural tradition of short story cycle, and fills it with the ancient Chinese tradition of talk story, through which all the characters have the chance to speak out their voices and tell their own stories. The central theme of the novel also lends itself to the construction of multiculturalism. The novel focuses on the bitter-sweet mother-daughter relationship between four pairs of mothers and daughters. Mothers and daughters symbolize Chinese culture and American culture respectively. Their relationship undergoes a process from misunderstanding to reconciliation, representing the communication and harmonious co-existence of Chinese and American cultures. To sum up, The Joy Luck Club illustrates well Amy Tan's multicultural conception and produces practical significance for the modern world.