On The Cultural Conflicts In The Kitchen God's Wife From The Intercultural Perspective

In today's 21^st century,intercultural communication is becoming a more widespread phenomenon of globalization.People who grow up in a certain social and cultural environment are bound to be influenced by the different cultural and environmental factors,thus forming relevantly particular values and thoughts.This kind of intercultural communication brings not only intercultural family relationships,but also some intercultural misunderstandings and even cultural conflicts.Among all those cultural conflicts in different countries,the conflicts between China an America are undoubtedly representative and possess great research value.The second book of the famous Chinese-American writer,Amy Tan,The Kitchen God's Wife,provides us with the stories that properly and fully reflect such complicated yet meaningful intercultural communication issues.This work unfolds memories with a large-scale first-person narrative of the mother,which appropriately shows the conflicts between the Chinese mother and American daughter in this intercultural context,and their ultimate mutual understandings through the acceptance of each other's cultures.The problems reflected in this book are extremely forward-looking.The speech acts of the characters in the novel essentially reflect a kind of social life pattern and convey cultural values,and the exchanges,integration and conflicts in the intercultural context highlight the Eastern and Western national cultural systems in this novel.Therefore,the subjects of this paper,the Chinese mother and American daughter,possess typical significance and practical value.However,compared with Amy Tan's masterpiece The Joy Luck Club,researches of the cultural conflicts on her second work The Kitchen God's Wife is still relatively insufficient.Therefore,by using some relevant theories to do text analysis,this thesis aims to analyze The Kitchen God's Wife,to comprehensively and dynamically explore the various cultural conflicts embodied in the work;hence summarize its guiding significance for intercultural communication.Through close reading of the text,this thesis takes the theory of cultural dimension,face theory and intercultural awareness as the theoretical framework of the whole study.Through comparative analysis of the two generations of mother and daughter who represent different cultures in East and West,this paper explores the various factors affecting these differences,such as language habits,social and cultural factors,including values,power distance,ways of thinking,high/low context,etc.The process and results of this study further validate the relevant theoretical system,and put forward various possibilities of alleviating or resolving these conflicts,so as to achieve a certain degree of conflict control at some point.Through the contradictory and reconciliation between the mother and daughter,this paper shows the whole process of the conflict between Chinese and Western cultures from its emergence to its solution,and proves that the conflict between Chinese and American cultures can be embodied in such aspects as cognition,behavioral norms,ways of thinking,face concern and values.Among them,different values are the fundamental factors leading to cultural conflicts.However,through proper conflict management,the final reconciliation and even cultural integration between Chinese and American cultures can be achieved.This article demonstrates that in the process of cultural development and revolution,the integration of cultures is the general trend.The study of cultural conflict at the individual level has an important enlightening effect on practical intercultural communication.At the same time,this study has certain pertinence and practical value for guiding the practical teaching of Second Language Acquisition.For example,teachers can take the initiative to help students understand and grasp the differences between Chinese and English expressions and cultural values,consciously overcome the negative transfer from their mother tongue;in addition,teachers can deliberately plan classroom activities to“prescribe the right remedy”so that students can find and correct their pragmatic errors,thereby improving intercultural communication ability.