Healing The Diaspora Consciousness By Memory Mentality

The Joy Luck Club, published in1989, is a typical Chinese American literary canon created by Amy Tan, a celebrated Chinese American woman writer. In this work, Tan the author, through a series of seemingly independent monologues, depicts the identity-seeking processes of four pairs of Chinese American mothers and daughters against the milieu of many generations of misunderstanding and sorrow in America, a new yet unfamiliar land. In the whole novel, Tan vividly portrays their cultural values, their mutual misunderstandings, struggles, clashes, and reconciliation, and eventually the restoration of their identity, representing and reshaping the literary landscape of Chinese American women’s identity-seeking process.The consistent theme centering around The Joy Luck Club is mothers’memory mentality.Taking the topic of traumatic memory specifically, this thesis highlights the centrality of memory mentality to the overall undertaking of healing the diaspora consciousness for people who are immigrants leaving away from their original home and living a diasporic life in a unfamiliar place where their ethnic and cultural identity is not accepted by the mainstream society. This thesis argues that the mothers’memory mentality about their past trauma experienced before their immigration enables the daughters as well as the mothers themselves to heal their diaspora consciousness, more specifically their feeling of loss. What the mothers feel they have lost is the matrilineal tie with their daughters; while the daughters have lost their Chinese identity deep inside their self, or more exactly the cultural "chi" or spirit for Chinese people. The mothers’ nonverbal form of their nostalgic memory of their past experiences in China could empower themselves. Their story-telling of their memory could motivate their daughters to speak up for themselves, and their persistent of their nostalgic memory could help to reconcile and reconnect with their daughters.The inevitable sense of loss is compensated by the creation of a transcultural consciousness that has extended the double consciousness into an awareness of a hybrid self deep inside. The mothers and daughters eventually manage to find out the shared humanity that is existent in both Chinese and American cultures, and they successfully heal the diaspora consciousness universal to different ethnic groups in the American society. This thesis utilizes the theory of "healing narrative" theory to analyze the cultural healing functions of The Joy Luck Club mothers’memory mentality. The mothers’ story-telling is indeed a specific form of "healing narrative". Targeting the culturally therapeutic qualities of the healing narratives by the mothers on the mother-daughter characters in the novel, this thesis also makes use of "matrilineage" in feminist studies and "identity" in sociology. The Joy Luck Club in itself is a matrilineal work, and the mothers’memory mentality also helps to amend their daughters’incomplete postmemory so as to form a collective matrilineal memory at last, and more importantly form a matrilineal tie between the mothers and daughters, which is lost initially. This paper forgrounds the foundamental significance of Chinese identity, or more narrowly the cultural "chi" or spirit in Chinese essence, for those immigrants with diaspora consciousness. The second-generation daughters are in a position of cultural dislocation because of their loss of the Chinese cultural "chi". Through active listening to their mothers’story-telling, they can not only learn the necessary cultural lessons from it but also restore their Chinese identity that has been repudiated by them from the very beginning, since they now are motivated to speak up for themselves without always dwarfing their Chinese identity in the face of American identity.