Conflicts And Reconciliation: The Ethical Problem In The Patchwork Family In The Love Wife

Gish Jen’s The Love Wife mainly explores individual life in a patchwork family – a Chinese-European interracial marriage family.This thesis interprets ethical conflicts and relationship between individual development and family unity in the patchwork family.What Gish Jen advocates is employing mixed ethics as a new solution to the conflicts.Such a solution helps to balance individual development and family harmony.By employing ethical literary criticism,this thesis points out that in a patchwork family,there are individual differences in ethnicity,cultural consciousness and blood relationships.The ethnic differences erode the marriage;the cultural differences between mother and son deepen the generation gap;while the blood lineage differences intensify the conflicts between the adoptive mother and the adopted children.When Chinese culture infiltrates into such a patchwork family,all conflicts are fueled and every family member is forced to reflect and take actions to change.To avoid the misunderstanding of differences which trouble individuals in the patchwork families,each family member needs to show acceptance of the differences.In The Love Wife,the injection of Chinese culture urges family members to make selfreflection.The overlapping of Chinese and American cultures stimulates Blondie to return home to re-establish her family role,forces Carnegie to embrace Chineseness and become a more confident American,and promotes the interracial adopted children Wendy and Lizzy to become cosmopolitans with multi-cultural identities.Family members in the Wongs learn to appreciate such kind of mixed ethics and contribute to family reconciliation.The portrayal of the patchwork family in The Love Wife reflects that in the multicultural social context,a patchwork American family is not only one with different ethnic features,cultural consciousness and kinships,but also a patchwork of mixed family ethics,which facilitate Americans to hold inclusiveness of differences.