Can Joy And Luck Persist?——Cultural Studies’ Approach to The Joy Luck Club

王炜琳

（西安政治学院 陕西 西安 710068）

0 Introduction

The Joy Luck Club was written by Amy Tan, an Americanized daughter of a Chinese-immigrant couple. Tan was appreciated for her straightforward manner as well as the skill with which she talks about Chinese culture and mother-and-daughter relationships. Readers can not only enjoy Tan’s humor, fairness,and objectivity, but also learn how she and her mother could get along better. Because, behind the generational differences experienced by every immigrant mother and daughter, the cultural distinctions added another dimension.

1 Analyzing through cultural studies

The Joy Luck Club presents the stories of four Chinese-immigrant women and their American-born daughters. Each of the four Chinese women has her own worldview based on her experiences in China and wants to share that vision with her daughter. The daughters try to understand and appreciate their mothers’ pasts, adapt to the American way of life, and win their mothers’ acceptance.

The book’s name comes from the club formed in China by one of the mothers,Suyuan Woo,in order to lift her friends’spirits and distract them from their problems during the Japanese invasion.As in the book, “…we could hope to be lucky.That hope was our only joy.And that’s how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.” Together, they feasted, laughed, played Mahjong, lost and won, told the best stories. The four ladies in America -Suyuan Woo,An-Mei Hsu,Londo Jong and Ying-ying St.Clairmoved to the same city San Francisco, and all of them joined the“First Chinese Baptist Church”. As most Chinese immigrants in 1950s did, they felt it important to get together because of their poor English,lower social status and cultural shock.The Joy Club served as a warm and quite place for them to release, recall and remember,in which Chinese collectivism was well kept.

Although Jing-Mei, Suyuan’s only daughter took her mother’s place - “the direction from which the sun rises, where the wind comes from”, how could she really take her mother’s place? Suyuan once said, when Jing-Mei shyly told her that someone said they were alike and “had the same wisps had gestures, the same girlish laugh and sideways look”, “You don’t even know little percent of me！ How can you be me?” Jing-Mei herself even confessed, “What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don't know anything” when her aunties wanted her to go to China to see her twin sisters and tell them about her mother. Just at the same time, the aunties were“frightened”, because in Jing-Mei, “they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America.”

Jing-Mei only played mah jong with her Jewish friends. It’s different from her mother, and that is what they could not accept.The second generation has changed. They became unfamiliar with their Chinese tradition.The Chinese side was fading away in their perception. So Jing-Mei could not play like her mother did before. She did not follow the good wishes of her mother. She changed to an American lady. Culture had changed her, in spite of her Chinese bloodline.As Jing-Mei could not be her mother at the mah jong table,how could the other daughters be their mothers? They were different generation, different person with different experiences, while culture did play a key role in distinction their worldviews.Since we are different from person to person,we cannot ignore the influence from cultural differences.

As the aging of the first generation, the second generation was growing up. Unlike what the Chinese mother had dreamed,the daughter “speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow” even didn’t know about her mother. Jing-Mei preferred to be called “June”, an American name, although she

knew well that “it’s becoming fashionable for American-born Chinese to use their Chinese names.” And she unceasingly quarreled with Waverly Jong, a daughter of her mother’s friend.Waverly didn’t want to accompany her mother on Saturday market days with her mother’s proud words “This is my daughter Waverly Jong.” In her typical American individualism mind, she and her mother are two people; her success is not her mother’s.Actually her mother, following that kind of Chinese collectivism,especially the concept of “family” in Chinese tradition, couldn’t understand that kind of embarrassment of her daughter, which is what opposite to her Chinese traditional value. The different worldviews made sharp conflict here. Back to the relationship between Waverly and Jing-Mei, we can smell the harshness from every word they speak to each other. It’s the evidence that the connection between them was not as tight as their mothers’. The second generation of the Chinese immigrants has got better social status than their parents, and they live in the contradiction of Chinese at home and American outside. It’s hard for them to finally reach the “golden point” between the two. In the end,they have to change, accepting the “big” culture instead of the“small” culture, that is, to become American and forget their Chinese side. In their mind, they care more about themselves than others, whether they are friend or daughter of mother’s friend. The daughters have lost commons in their deeply rooted personality, they are Americans, speaking only English, and the Joy Luck Club has lost its foundation to survive.

2 Conclusion

America is preferred to be called a melting pot. Different people with different color and language came here, gave up their own customs, then received New World’s way of life. They find themselves trapped in a cross-cultural dilemma, just as those in The Joy Luck Club. Is what they did a kind of “evolution” or just struggle to survive the transformation? What we are sure about is that the gap between the generation is widen, so does the cultural gap, which will contribute to the destination of the club’s joy and luck： that’s the last day of the club. As time goes by, there’s something we can never recall, and somewhere we can never return. We are no more the person we used to be,why should we still hold what belong to the past? What we need is to face the changing, standing just in front of the conflicts,because we can manage everything well instead of prolonging what we can no longer bear.

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