On Chinese Culture’s Transmission In The Joy Luck Club:from The Perspective Of Memetics

The Joy Luck Club is the first novel of American Chinese writer Amy Tan, which also wins great fame for her. This novel centers on stories among the four Chinese women who immigrated to America around1950s and their America-born daughters who grew up under American environment. Since the publication this novel gains praise prefer to critic:most scholars home and broad show their positive attitude toward this work, among which are many related researches both thoroughly and objectively; while some other writers and scholars criticize this novel heavily-they consider this novel as a result under the influence of Orientalism and the author, Amy Tan only degrades and distorts the Chinese traditional culture to attract the interest of American mainstream society out of curiosity. Facing the negative opinion, some scholars repute that the arrangement of ending in this novel symbolizes a destruction of the Orientalism:at last each pair of mother and daughter turns to reconciliation from confrontation, which is just the reflection of the process from conflicts to concords between Sino American cultures. This thesis put the emphasis on the presentation and transmission of Chinese cultural elements in this novel:the Chinese traditional thoughts rooting in the mothers’generation has also influenced the daughters’generation. On the one hand, the daughters disregard the Chinese blood in their body droved by the desire of getting entrance into the American mainstream society. On the other hand, they get acquaintance with the Chinese cultural elements and accept them unintentionally by their mothers’verbal or deed instruction. To explain this cultural transmission phenomenon of this novel in detail, this paper applies memetics to the related research.After meme has been first proposed by Richard Dawkins, many scholars such as Susan Blackmore, Richard Brodie, Aaron Lynch, etc, continue his opinion and actively do researches to attempt to build memetics. And this new theoretical system has been used in more and more fields. As what gene to biological evolution, meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. All the things that could be replicated and transmitted constantly can be classified as meme, such as language, customs, notions and social behaviors etc. Therefore the Chinese cultural elements represented by mothers in the novel are memes. These Chinese cultural memes follow the four general steps in their replication:assimilation, retention, expression and transmission. They also own the three characters to be replicator:variation, selection and transmission. That is to say, in the replication, these Chinese cultural memes would change to some extent. While these meme are not strong memes limited by the environment they replicate and transmit:the great disparity of Chinese culture and American mainstream culture leads to the marginalization of these memes. The mothers hope daughters could inherit the spiritual treasure they bring from China while the daughters pay their attention only to the acceptance of American society. Different choices toward cultural memes lead to the conflicts and confrontation of these two generations. While two different cultures could also achieve agreement in some way, which is meme adaption indeed:when the hosts expose to some memes different from existing ones, they will transform this difference in order to absorb the new memes as well as make the new memes adapt to existing ones. Meme selection and meme adaption lead to two kind results of cultural communication:cultural conflicts and cultural concords.