Amy Final

Amy Tan

The Joy Luck Club

&

The Kitchen God's Wife

Ethnic Identity and the Cultural -Generational Conflicts

Tan explores through her fiction the knotty issues of ethnic identity. She writes about the diaspora culture as well as the many facets of biculturalism: cultural dislocation; the problems and challenges of integrating two cultures; and intergenerational struggles within immigrant families.

(Huntley 24)

Ethnic identity and conflict, both cultural and generational, is a

common thread that runs through Tan's three novels: The Joy Luck Club,

The Kitchen God's Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses. Because these

novels depict the lives of Chinese immigrant women in America and the

difficulties they face as a result of being bicultural, Tan explores the role

of ethnic identity and its effect on the conflicts that erupt among her

characters. In fact, there is a correlation between ethnic identity and the

struggles, either cultural or generational. In Tan's novels, it is the absence

of a clear understanding of ethnic identity that causes conflicts, and these

conflicts by its turn intensify the dilemma of ethnic identity. It is only

when Tan's characters begin to accept their ethnic identities that their

struggles come to an end, and by putting these struggles aside, they begin

to appreciate their ethnic identities.

Chinese-Americans, and in fact any immigrants, have to look for

answers to two different but related questions: who they are? And to

which ethnic group do they belong? The former question is related to

self-identity, while the later, which concerns us here, is related to ethnic

identity. The immigrant, particularly the second-generation, finds

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himself trapped between two different cultures, the culture of his

homeland and that of his new adopted country. To which culture does he

belong? What is his true identity? Is it that of his homeland? His adopted

country? Or a mixture of both? It is from this point that conflicts, both

cultural and generational, come to the surface and cannot be resolved

until one comes to an understanding and acceptance of his ethnic identity.

As Steven P. Sondrup said:

On the one hand, the immigrant feels varying degrees of alienation in the new culture: unfamiliar customs, habits, laws, and language exert a powerful centrifugal force toward the outer edges of society. On the other hand, the immigrant also experiences an alienation from the home culture as well (35).

Clear enough, ethnic identity is an important aspect to the cultural

and generational struggles that separate the first generation Chinese

immigrant mothers from their American born daughters in Tan's selected

novels. It is important first to differentiate between ethnic identity and

acculturation because there may be some overlapping aspects between

them.

According to Jean S. Phinney, the distinction between the construct

of ethnic identity and acculturation is unclear, and these two concepts are

often used interchangeably. Ethnic identity is that aspect of acculturation

that focuses on the subjective sense of belonging to a group or culture

(495).

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In this way, acculturation is a broader construct that encompasses

ethnic identity as an aspect of it. It is through the theoretical study of the

process of acculturation that the concept of ethnic identity becomes clear

and understandable. John W. Berry's model of acculturation clarifies this

point. In his study, Berry suggests that there are four strategies used by

the immigrants in dealing with acculturation, which are "integration,

assimilation, separation, and marginalization" (296). Based on this

model, Phinney suggests that an individual who retains a strong ethnic

identity while also identifying with the new society is considered to have

an integrated (or bicultural) identity. One who has a strong ethnic

identity but does not identify with the new culture has a separate identity,

whereas one who gives up an ethnic identity and identifies only with the

new culture has an assimilated identity. The individual who identifies

with neither has a marginalized identity (496).

Applying this to Tan's selected novels helps us to understand that a

great part of the conflict between the first generation Chinese immigrant

mothers and their second generation American born daughters is due to

the process of acculturation. Despite decades of living in America, the

mothers are unable to fully acculturate in the mainstream culture. In fact,

they did that on purpose. They still hold on their ethnic identities and

don't identify completely with the mainstream culture. Whereas the

second generation American born immigrants grow up to speak perfect

American English in order to assimilate and socialize into the white

American society and the Anglo-American dominant culture. They have

to alienate themselves from the Chinese influences of their immigrant

mothers who embody the Chinese culture, that is, the lower and minor

class in the society and are thus hindering their complete acculturation.

They ignore or discard their ethnic roots and identify only with their new

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culture to become completely American, as stated by Huntley when she

talks about The Joy Luck Club:

Although outwardly they are well established in their new lives, the mothers never assimilate entirely; they never acquire fluent English, never relinquish the rituals and ceremonies of their pasts, and never forget their Chinese years. Their English-speaking daughters, by contrast, are thoroughly and indelibly American by birth, by education, and by inclination (30).

Before discussing ethnic identity and its effect on the struggles that

erupt among Tan's characters, it is important to understand what is meant

by ethnic identity. The concept appears when the immigrant comes to the

realization that it is not possible to be completely accepted by the host

society. In such bicultural conditions, the hyphenated person, whom

Grsjean characterizes as "living in two or more cultures, adapting, at least

in part, to both, and blending aspects of the two" (qtd. in Oster 59-60),

needs to form a clear concept of ethnic identity. Ben Xu comments:

Only when a (….) person is uprooted from his or her own culture and transplanted into an alien one does he or she become aware of the fluidity, proteanness, and insecurity of his or her self. It is not until then that he or she feels the need to define himself or herself by a reference group (9).

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Despite its great importance, there is no one universally accepted

definition of ethnic identity used by academics or by ordinary people.

The fact that there is no widely agreed upon definition of ethnic identity

is indicative of the confusion surrounding the topic. Definitions vary

according to the different theoretical perspectives on ethnicity. The

psychologist Jean Phinney notes that there are "widely discrepant

definitions and measures of ethnic identity, which makes generalizations

and comparisons across studies difficult and ambiguous" (500). She

defines it as "a sense of belonging to an ethnic group and thinking,

perception, feelings, and behaviors due to ethnic group

membership"(500). Also, Phinney maintains that "ethnic identity is a

dynamic, multidimensional construct that refers to one's identity, or sense

of self as a member of an ethnic group". She goes on to add that:

Ethnic identity is not a fixed categorization, but rather is a fluid and dynamic understanding of self and ethnic background. Ethnic identity is constructed and modified as individuals become aware of their ethnicity, with in the large (socio-cultural) setting (63).

A quite similar definition is given by The Greenwood

Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature which defines ethnic

identity as: "The sense of sharing an ethnic heritage, comprising common

ancestry, shared beliefs, and lifestyles" (1043). By the same token,

Madan Sarup describes it as "an identification with a group conscious of

its language, religion, history, tradition and ways of life" (178).

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Another important definition of ethnic identity is given by J.Milton

Yinger in his book Ethnicity: Source of Strength? Source of Conflict? As

he views ethnic identity as:

An individual's identification with a segment of a larger society whose members are thought, by themselves or others, to have a common origin and share segments of a common culture and who, in addition, participate in shared activities in which the common origin and culture are significant ingredients (3).

From a sociological point of view, ethnic identity is regarded as a

component of social identity. Much of the work in this area relies on the

social psychologist Henri Tajfel's (1982) theory of social identity. Tajfel

basically maintains that one's social identity strongly influences self-

perception and consequently should be the central locus of evaluation.

The strength and weakness of the self is largely determined from our

status with our reference groups and how we assess out group members.

Tajfel's social identity theory has generated considerable influence on

ethnic identity research; he defines it as:

That part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership (qtd. in Phinney 500).

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Also, from the same perspective, the sociologist Milton Gordon

defines ethnicity as a "sense of people hood" and ethnic group as a "group

with a shared feeling of people hood" (qtd. in McDonald 4). While the

Handbook of Self and Identity defines it as "a function of one's socio-

cultural position and influences, attitudes, emotion, motivations, and

social behavior"(556).

Simply put, ethnic identity refers to where one's bloodline starts,

and to a sense of belonging to an ethnic group. It seems most often to be

a frame in which individuals identify consciously or unconsciously with

those with whom they feel a common bond because of similar traditions,

behaviors, values, and believes. It is the mixture of conceptual and

behavioral characteristics that are found in a group of people that set it

apart from any other. By all means, it is, as J.Milton Yinger puts it, "a

topic filled with so many assumptions, guided by such poorly defined

terms, and evocative of such strong emotions"(9).

Despite the great debate about the concept of ethnic identity, there

is a common agreement among critics that it plays a significant role in

Amy Tan's fiction. Although her novels are saturated with a variety of

themes, arguably one of the most important themes throughout her novels

involves exploring the challenges faced by immigrants struggling over

their ethnic identities. Each of Tan's characters attempts to strike a

balance between the Chinese and American cultures. The older

generation of women, the mothers, cannot be fully acculturate and still

hold on to their ethnic roots hoping to pass it down to their children.

They struggle to pass on their traditional cultural values to their

daughters. Conversely, the daughters attempt to fit in as born and bred

Americans while honoring their mothers' cultures.

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Thus, the dilemma of ethnic identity in Tan's novels is limited to

the second generation American born immigrants since the mothers in

The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, and Kwan in The Hundred

Secret Senses find almost no difficulties concerning their identities. They

identify themselves as Chinese part and parcel. Their contact with the

mainstream culture is superficial and limited. These elderly immigrants

only effect structural assimilation; that is they make changes in their

lifestyles or in the matter of language and dress. While, on the other hand,

The second-generation American born daughters are fictional

representations of the Chinese American who are caught between Old

world ethnic values and New world cultural norms. It is these immigrants

who suffer the problem of dual identities and affiliations. They identify

themselves as fully Americanized and deny any Chinese part in them

except their facial features. As Lindo Jong describes her daughter in The

Joy Luck Club: "Only her skin and her hair are Chinese. Inside- she is all

American made" (254). In Memory And Ethnic Self Ben Xu comments on

this point saying:

The need to ethnize their experience and to establish an identity is more real and more perplexing to the daughters than to the mothers, who, after all, are intimate with and secure in their Chinese cultural identity in an experiential sense, in a way their American-born daughters can never be(15).

Actually, there are many factors that affect Tan's American born

immigrant's acceptance of their ethnic identities. Factors such as shame,

stereotypes, and the relationship between the second generation American

born and their immigrant parents greatly affect the immigrant's

willingness to embrace his/her ethnic identity.

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Shame is an inevitable part of Chinese experience, as attested by

many Chinese American writers including Tan herself. The sense of

shame can be particularly strong among immigrant children of Chinese

descent. There are many sources of shame. Tan admits that she was

ashamed of her mother and her Chinese behavior, a point confirmed by

her dread concerning "what her mother would bring to her birthday party

at school. Would it be an exotic Chinese dish that other kids would make

fun of it?" (qtd. in Adams 8) Another source of shame was her mother's

English. When her mother spoke English, Tan probably felt a sense of

diu lian, "the feeling of shame that occurs with loss of reputation or

standing in the eyes of others," as her mother's poor English was too

noticeable (Frank 888). Tan was definitely not the only immigrant child

who felt ashamed of her mother. As Herbert J. Gans says in Symbolic

Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America, "the

second generation…was often ashamed of immigrant parents" (433).

While feeling ashamed of their parents, immigrant children

become also deeply ashamed of their ethnicity. Daughters in Tan's The

Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, and Olivia in The Hundred

Secret Senses, feel ashamed of their ethnic part, so they deny their ethnic

identities and those who represent it. They feel compelled to reject the

"M-other" as part of their identity (Yu 6). Michael Cornier clarifies this

point saying:

Part of the problem is that the daughters mistakenly equate their Chinese heritage with their mothers. Consequently, their American–style rebellions against their mothers include a rejection of their Chinese heritage and thus of part of their own identity (158).

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As reflected in The Joy Luck Club, when the American born

daughters were young, all of them were ashamed of their Chinese

ethnicity and they wished to be called Americans. For example, Lena St.

Clair, who is half Chinese, inherited from her Irish-English father many

Caucasian physical traits, and she could easily pass as a white girl.

Nevertheless, Lena's eyes are small, "as if they were carved on a jack-o'-

lantern with two swift cuts of a short knife" (106). To conceal and deny

her Chinese heritage, Lena would "push [her eyes] in on the sides to

make them rounder" (106). Also, Lindo Jong says that her daughter

Waverly would be elated, if someone had told her that she had an

"American look on her face" (253). While Jing-mei is embarrassed by her

mother's behaviour in public:

haggling with store owners, pecking her mouth with a toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes(267).

Therefore, it becomes evident that the second-generation Chinese

Americans are often ashamed of their immigrant parents, and some of

them even wish that they could sever their ties and relations with their

Chinese heritage.

Another important reason that affects the daughters' acceptance of

their ethnic identities is the stereotypes of Chinese women. Stereotypes

are, in Diana Kendall words, "overgeneralizations about the appearance,

behavior, or other characteristics of members of particular categories"

(287). Tan's American-born characters tend to stereotype their mothers

as displaced, old-fashioned ladies, so they do not often give them "the

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space to particularize themselves or to cross over into their lives", as Su-

lin Yu puts it :

The daughters assimilate certain stereyotypi- cal and Orientalist views of the Chinese that alienate them from their own mothers and heritage. In the eyes of American daughters, the mother is seen as a terrifying figure of omnipotence whom the daughter must flee to ensure some autonomy and identity for herself (5).

In his book Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration,

Ethnicity, and Community Transformation, Min Zhou states that the

second generation regard their immigrant parents as "lao-wan-gu"

which means "old stick in the mud" or "stubborn head", and the

parental ways as "feudal or old-fashioned" (187-88). Also, the Chinese

women are largely stereotyped as helpless, passive, and that they are

treated as if they are things, if not, as Tan puts it in The Opposite of

Fate, "little dolls sold in Chinatown tourist shops, heads bobbing up

and down in complacent agreement to anything said!" (281)

These stereotypes, and many others, seriously affect the American

born immigrant's regard to their ethnic identities and, in Wendy Ho's

words, "suppress the daughter's desire to deal with an immigrant mother,

who is often judged or devaluated in terms of an 'American mindset' that

sees her mother as 'other,' as 'outsider,' as 'intruder'(162) .

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Sociological research has also found that the strength of the child's

relationship with his/her parents, along with the level of his/her

attachment to the ethnic community also play important roles in

determining ethnic identity among second generation Asian Americans.

For example, if child-parent relationship is strong and healthy, the child is

more likely to take on the parent's identity. However, if the child has

conflicts with his/her parents, the more likely the child will identify

differently from the parent.

Taking Tan's three selected novels as an example, it appears that

the second generation American born daughters reject their ethnic

identities as there are many misunderstanding and miscommunication in

their relationships with their own mothers. It is only when they begin to

form a friendly and loving relationship with their mothers that they begin

to accept their ethnic identities, and vice versa.

Because of its great importance, denial of ethnic identity doesn't

pass without unpleasant consequences. One of the most notable

consequences of ethnic identity rejection is, as already mentioned, the rise

of conflicts, either cultural or generational. In the three selected novels,

there is a continuous struggle between the Chinese immigrant mothers

who try to instill their ethnic roots into their children, and the

Americanized immigrants who try to escape it.

Along with ethnic identity, there are some aspects of the

differences between the two concerned cultures, Chinese and American,

which cause the cultural conflicts and intensify the generational ones in

the selected novels. Of course being trapped between two different

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cultures and two different generations is a sufficient reason, but there are

other additional factors such as the difference in cultural values and

traditions between Chinese and American society, language barriers, and

the desire for assimilation. All these elements and much more add, so to

speak, fuel to the fire.

Many of the conflicts between the Chinese immigrant parents and

their Americanized children are related to the fact that the Chinese

parents hold to their Chinese traditional values, which were mainly based

on Confucianism, to raise their children in America. Therefore, it is

significant to understand Chinese culture and values and how they

compare to American culture and values.

Two significant principles in Confucianism help us understand the

relationship between the Chinese immigrant parents and their

Americanized children: the family as an entity, and filial piety.

Confucianism considers the family as the fundamental unit of the

society and emphasizes the importance of the family as one unit versus

individuality, which is a more American value. Therefore, any attempt at

achieving independence from the family may perceived as rebellious and

lead to serious intergenerational conflicts. In Tan's The Kitchen God's

Wife, for example, the Chinese immigrant mother, Winnie Louie, states

this difference to her daughter:

In China back then, you were always responsible to some body else. It is not like here in the United States- freedom, independence, individual thinking, do what you want, disobey your mother. No such thing (132).

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Filial piety, which is a basic principle in Confucianism, implies

strict obedience by children and respect to their parents. Two illustrative

examples stated in Tan's The Joy Luck Club, one between Suyuan woo

and her daughter Jing-mei, in which Suyuan replies angrily to her

daughter's disobedience saying:

There are only two kinds of daughters, those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house, obedient daughters! (142)

Another illustrative example is stated by Waverly Jong speaking

about her mother:

Well, I don't know if it's explicitly stated in the law, but you can't ever tell a Chinese mother to shut up. You could be charged as an accessory to your own murder (173).

Also, in The Kitchen God's Wife, when the American born, Pearl,

tells her mother to "stop complaining"(13), which a Chinese mother

considers none respect, the mother, Winnie, stopped talking to her

daughter for about two months.

Thus, Chinese-American daughters in Tan's novels feel conflict

when these two different cultures: collectivism and interdependence from

the Chinese culture and individualism and independence from the

American culture- collide and are both imposed upon them.

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Another important aspect of cultural differences that causes

conflict between second generation Chinese Americans and their parents

is language. In fact, the language barriers between Chinese-speaking

parents and English-speaking children make open communication

difficult. In The Joy Luck Club, for example, the American born Jing-

mei says: "My mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did.

I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese" (33). In her

book, Chinese Americans and Their Immigrant Parents, May Tung finds

that this feeling is very common among Chinese American born children;

with both generations considering themselves monolingual,

misunderstandings are frequent (28).

Thus, the absence of a common language between the Chinese

immigrant characters and the American born one's in Tan's novels widens

the distance that separates them and intensifies the dilemma of ethnic

identity and conflicts.

Assimilation, as Yinger defines it, is "a process of boundary

reduction that can occur when members of two or more societies or

smaller cultural group meet"(qtd. in Marger 82). Similarly, Alan S.

Berger defines it as "the process of normative and social integration of

immigrants into society (257). The sociologist Diana Kendall argues in

her book, Sociology in Our Time: The Essentials, that the process of

assimilation occurs at several distinct levels, including the cultural,

structural, biological, and psychological stages (292). Being herself a

hyphenated American, Tan discusses in a number of interviews her

childhood efforts to assimilate into white America by:

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Whitening her facial features, albeit unsuccessfully by pegging her nose, along with choosing the most desirable and readily available aspects of mainstream American culture, including convenience food, fashionable clothes and make up (Adams 7).

She summarizes what happens in the process of assimilation

accurately when she says: "what happens in assimilation is that we

deliberately end up choosing the American things -hot dogs and apple

pie- and ignoring the Chinese offerings (qtd. in Adams 7). Also, in

Inter/view: Talks with America's Writing Women, Tan comments that:

"with assimilation you have a dominant culture and the underlying

message is you have to reject your other culture"(16).

It is apparent thus that the desire for assimilation affects the

immigrant's acceptance of his/her ethnic identity, as Birgit Zinzius

remarks in Chinese America: Stereotype and Reality, "Assimilation

versus ethnic pride and identity"(253). That is; due to their desire for

assimilation, the second-generation immigrants reject their ethnic

identities.

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The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club (1989) is Amy Tan's first and best-selling

novel, which hits the best-seller list where it stayed for nine months. The

hardcover edition bears enthusiastic blurbs by Alice Walker, Alice

Hoffman, and Louise Erdrich, and was reprinted twenty-seven times, with

more than 220,000 copies in print. The novel was nominated for the

National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a

recipient of the 1990 Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction. In

1993, the book was turned into a movie, directed by Wayne Wang and

Tan wrote the screen adaptation and was one of the film's producers. No

doubt, the popularity of this book was further enhanced with the success

of the film and The Joy Luck Club has been translated into at least twenty

languages, including Arabic and Chinese.

The reviews of The Joy Luck Club have mirrored its popular

success. Carole Angier describes the novel as a "huge hit in America…

very cunningly crafted"(97), while Gloria Shen describes it as a

"collection of intricate and haunting memories couched in carefully

wrought stories"(5). In Drowning an America, Starving for China,

Carolyn See describes her admiration for novel saying: "The only

negative thing I could ever say about this book is that I'll never again be

able to read it for the first time". Also, In Mothers and Daughters

Michael Dorris commented: "The Joy Luck Club is that rare, mesmerizing

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novel one always seeks but seldom finds"(90). Dorris goes on saying

that:

Tan succeeds not only in her careful language, not only in the vista she opens before us, but also in the heart with which she invests this generous book. The Joy Luck Club is well-named; it is a pure joy to read (91).

The novel is mainly about four Chinese immigrant mothers:

Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair, and four

American-born daughters: Jing-mei "June" Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan,

Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. The four Chinese American immigrant

families start a club known as the joy luck in which they used to gather to

play the Chinese game of Mahjong and feast on Chinese food. As they

play Mahjong, the old women remember stories about the past and lament

the barriers that separate them from their daughters.

Actually, The Joy Luck Club is an outstanding example of the

dilemma of ethnic identity and the conflicts that arise within the

immigrant families, as indicated by Bella Adams in Becoming Chinese:

Racial Ambiguity in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club when she says that

"one of the main issues in The Joy Luck Club is racial ambiguity"(93).

Four mothers and four daughters mean two different generations.

The mothers who represent the old generation are Chinese immigrants

and exemplify the Chinese culture with all its aspects: clothes, manners,

values, thinking, language and even food. The daughters who represent

the second generation are American born and again they exemplify the

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American culture with all its features. As stated by Hon-Ming Yip in

Autobiographical Narratives and the Subject Approach to the Study of

Chinese Identity:

The Joy luck Club deals with cultural dislocation and generation gap of ethnic Chinese in the U.S as there immigrant communities are situated in settings where they are environed by other culture, and where rapid modernization and social change aggravate difficulties of communication between the first and second generations with different levels of education and life experiences (101).

Thus, we have two parties; two generations and two cultures. The

differences, with its different aspects, between these two groups make

their conflicts inevitable. And as an attempt to avoid these conflicts, the

daughters who, in Amy Ling's words, "find themselves caught between

two worlds. Their racial features proclaim one fact- their Asian ethnicity-

but by education, choice, or birth they are American" (qtd. in Cheung 2),

choose the worst thing to do, they distance themselves from their mothers

and consequently from the culture and ethnic identity that their mothers

represent. In other words, by rejecting their own mothers, the daughters

reject their ethnic roots, an act that hurts their mothers too much. Huntley

has clarified this point:

As the mothers struggle to imbue their daughters with a sense of Chinese tradition, the daughters in their turn wrestle with the need to reconcile their American lives and careers with the impossible and incomprehensible(to them) expectations of their mothers whose values remain rooted in china. The result is alienation and finally

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silence between mothers and daughters, exacerbated by an almost unbridgeable gulf between generations (30-31).

Unlike their daughters, the Chinese immigrant mothers in the novel

feel connected to their mothers, and by turn to their heritage, a fact that is

stated by one of the mothers, An-mei, who says:

I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way (215).

However, they are unable to convey this heritage to their

American-born daughters because, as stated by Melanie McAlister in

(Mis) Reading The Joy Luck Club, in America they "have been silenced

by the language barrier, by cultural prejudices and racism that render

them as 'outside', and ineffective"(10-11).

In The Joy Luck Club, the four mothers want the best for their

daughters. They attempt, in Wendy Ho's words, to raise "college

educated, yuppie daughters" who are able to "acculturate and assimilate

into mainstream American society" and who can also "speak perfect

English, get a good job, maintain a comfortable, financially secure

lifestyle, fit in as they themselves could not" (55). They want them to

have all the advantages that America has to offer, but at the same time

they want them to live their Chinese heritage and exemplify the Chinese

values. In other words, they want their daughters to have "the best

combination: American circumstances and Chinese character" (Joy 254).

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The four daughters, on the other hand, want to become fully

assimilated and want to minimize their Chinese appearance and heritage

to be regarded as Americans. Brought up in America, they have imbibed

some racism and stereotypes concerning ethnic minorities from the

mainstream media. By rejecting the minority part in themselves, the

daughters believe that this would assist their assimilation to the

mainstream culture. Therefore, the daughters have to free themselves

from their mothers and cast off the minority, or in a stronger word, the

impure part of their heritages. As a result of this difference between

mothers and daughters regarding cultural and ethnic identity, conflicts

arise. Huntley has argued:

The Joy Luck mothers have borne daughters, and invested in them all of the hopes and dreams that have propelled the older generation across an ocean to America... And yet, the daughters see in their mothers not nurturing angles, only stern disciplinarians, domineering and possessive women who refuse to relinquish any maternal control although the daughters are adults with their own homes (26-7).

The mothers want their daughters to be Chinese-American; the

hyphen here means the connection between one's identity with respect to

his/her ethnic identity. The problem is that the daughters want to be just

Americans putting aside their Chinese heritage, and as a result avoiding

their mothers who represent it. They feel that they are "alien to Chinese

culture as much as they are to their mothers' uncanny Chinese ways of

thinking" (Shen 6). In fact, the mothers work hard to make sure their

daughters remain aware of Chinese traditions and ideologies, Chinese and

American cultures, and much of the daughters' identity struggle occurs

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because they are trapped between Chinese and American cultures. In

Born of Stranger, Gloria Shen says:

When the mother talks about American ways, the daughter is willing to listen; when the mother shows her Chinese ways, the daughter ignores her. the mother is thus unable to teach her the Chinese ways of obeying parents, of listening to the mother's mind, of hiding her thoughts, of knowing her own worth without becoming vain, and, most important of understanding why "Chinese thinking is best"(10).

It is quite clear thus that the women in The Joy Luck Club find

themselves in, as Barbara Tepa puts it, a "double jeopardy", they are

placed at odds because the mothers come from a cultural background

different from that of the daughters, and since the daughters have no

direct knowledge of Chinese culture, the values that their mothers hold

seem empty (222).

After decades of give and take, it turns out that neither of them, I

see, is right. The daughters "can identify themselves for sure neither as

Chinese nor American" (Xu 15). By neglecting their ethnic roots, the

daughters live as incomplete persons and face many problems in their

lives. Jing-mei drops out of college and still unmarried at the age 36.

Waverly, despite her apparent successful live, fails in her first marriage

and is going to remarry but she fears that her mother's disapproval of her

fiancé may destroy her second marriage. Rose is married to a foreigner

who wishes to divorce her because she is too passive, and finally Lena is

married to a man who manipulates her in the name of his so-called

equality. To get rid of their problems and live as whole persons, they

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should first accept the fact that they are not only American, but Chinese-

American. The mothers, by their turn, discover that by silence they

exaggerate their daughters' confusion about their ethnic identities. By not

sharing their stories, and thus their cultural context, the mothers have

fostered miscommunication, leaving their daughters to live with what Ho

terms "the dis-ease of the great unsaids" (Ho 19). Also, Patricia Hamilton

writes:

Incomplete cultural knowledge impedes understanding on both sides, but it particularly inhibits the daughters from appreciating the delicate negotiations their mothers have performed to sustain their identities across two cultures (125).

Since there are two chapters for each daughter, one about her

childhood and the other about her current life as an adult, I'm going to

speak about the theme of ethnic identity and conflicts in these two stages.

In childhood, the daughters were still completely under their mothers'

maternal control at home while experiencing a completely different way

of life and thinking outside. This stage is marked by a great and open

conflict, especially in the case of Jing-mei and Waverly Jong. The second

stage of conflict occurs when the daughters are adult, and in this case, it is

just a quite or, so to speak, hidden conflict, since the daughters are no

more under their mothers' control and are separated from their mothers

both physically and emotionally. It is a stage in which questions of

ethnic identity come to the surface. As the girls mature into women, they

begin to recognize the importance of retaining their Chinese identities in

spite of their American upbringings.

24

From the four daughters, I'll begin with the central character, Jing-

mei, whose voice echoes that of the other daughters in the novel, and the

wide cultural-generational gap that separates her from her mother,

Suyuan Woo. Jing-mei narrates the book's two frame stories. By doing

so, she "links the two generations of American Chinese, who are

separated by age and cultural gaps, and yet bound together by family ties

and continuity of ethnic heritage"(Xu 14). She becomes, in Erin Fallon

words, a "foil for the other daughters (Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong,

and Lena St.Clair), who reject their Chinese heritage and, consequently,

become distanced from their mothers"(400). In this way, and as stated by

Zenobia Mistri in Discovering the Ethnic Name and the Genealogical Tie

in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club:

The thematic design for the book evolves through the central story of June Woo and her finding of her ethnic self through her mother. The supporting stories of the other daughters stand as leitmotifs of the fractured relationships between the mothers and their daughters… June woo holds the answer to the puzzle of the 16 stories (47).

To phrase it alternately, Jing-mei, as stated by Huntley, is

"catapulted into becoming the uneasy representative of the American-

born daughters…"(32). The mothers in the novel see in Jing-mei their

own daughters with all their rebellious attitudes towards their mothers,

their ignorance of the true worth of their mothers and the culture that they

represent, daughters who try to abandon their Chinese cultural heritage in

25

order to live as fully assimilated Chinese-Americans. Jing-mei realizes

their feeling and says:

They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English… They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation (40-1).

Like all the other American born daughters in the novel, Jing-mei

struggles to "distance herself from the kind of helpless obedience that she

recognizes in traditional Chinese women"(Schell 3), which is manifested

in her mother and the other women of The Joy Luck Club. An-mei, one

of her aunties, states part of these characteristics of the traditional

Chinese women, which the American daughters rebel against, by saying:

"I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow

other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness" (215).

Unlike the way that An-mei, and in fact all the other Chinese

immigrant women in Tan's selected novels, was raised by, the mothers do

not want their daughters to be passive and obedient, but they do want

them to respect the older generation. Thus, despite her adherence to her

Chinese heritage, Suyuan, like all the mothers of The Joy Luck Club,

wanted a different life to her daughter. She came to America hoping for a

better life for her; a hope that is explicitly stated in the prologue to the

first section of the novel, Feathers From A Thousand Li Away:

26

In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! (17)

But the American-born Jing-mei "cannot swallow her mother's

sorrow, nor achieve her mother's dreams". She also "cannot navigate the

mother's struggle to retain the good of Chinese customs and cleave to the

advantages of American life"(Shawn 4). It's here that the core of their

conflict lays. The struggle here is due to cultural differences between the

Chinese mother and her American born daughter. Coming from rigidly

patriarchal China in which she used to be silent and subservient, Suyuan

expects complete obedience from her American-born daughter who,

unlike her mother, is raised in the American culture which supports

independence and freedom of choice.

In his book The Chinese Experience in America Henry Tsai

attributes this conflict as being the outcome of the gap between parental

expectation and child performance existent in Chinese American families.

He notes that the Chinese upbringing demands high achievement from the

children (143). This can be explained as the ethnic reaction to racist

stereotyping. The first generation Chinese immigrants, having suffered

from racist policies and discriminations wish to prove themselves through

their children. Therefore they impose a strict discipline upon their

children. This is the reason behind Suyuan Woo's overwhelming desire

27

to make a prodigy out of June. Unfortunately, the American-born

children are unable to understand their parents' ambitious attitude in the

alien country.

Although she is too young to realize what ethnic identity means,

Jing-mei is quite aware that she does not accept her mother's Chinese

way of thinking and tries to avoid it by all costs. For example, Suyuan

Woo believes that Jing-mei "could be any thing [she] wanted to be in

America"(132). While Jing-mei "didn't believe [she] could be anything

[she] wanted to be. [She] could only be [herself]"(142). Their completely

different thinking makes their conflict inevitable.

In order to achieve her American dream of success, Suyuan

submits Jing-mei to different daily tests without asking her daughter what

she really wants, because according to her Chinese culture a daughter is

taught to "desire nothing"(215). By doing so, Suyuan put the first brick

in the wall that separates her from her daughter, and also arouses the

power of resistance and the rebellious side of June, who says:

And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me-because I had never seen that face before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. This girl and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself, I won't be who I'm not (134).

Unfortunately, despite her endless attempts, time passes "without

any mention of (June) being a prodigy"(135), but Suyuan does not give

28

up. Inspired by a Chinese girl she sees performing on the Ed Sullivan

Show, Suyuan determines to make her daughter a musical prodigy. On

her part, Jing-mei becomes more and more openly defiant against her

mother's wishes, she says:

Why don't you like me the way I am? I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars! (136)

Later, when Suyuan insists that Jing-mei continues to attend piano

lessons, despite her "talent-show fiasco"(141), she becomes more

insistent not to submit to her mother's wishes. It is out of this situation

that Jing-mei begins to realize the cultural gap between her mother's

traditional Chinese ideas and Confucian learning about daughters being

obedient and her own liberal American ideas about her right to make her

own decisions and assert her own will:

And then I decided. I didn't have to do what my mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before and look what happened. She was the stupid one (141).

These words clarify Jing-mei's, and in fact many Americans',

concept about the Chinese culture. She believes that China is a backward

country in which woman is treated as a slave. Borne this idea in her mind

since childhood, how can she accept such culture? How can she

appreciate such ethnic identity? This indicates here that by rejecting her

mother, Jing-mei is in fact means to reject her mother's culture with all its

old fashioned thoughts and traditions. She does not want the Chinese

29

culture to be part of her own, so she tries to sever any ties connects her to

it, and since her mother is the only link between her and the Chinese

culture, she attempts to cut it.

The climax of their conflict comes when Jing-mei begins to

develop her cultural identity and asserts her own will against her mother's

attempts to mold her in the shape of her own hopes and dreams. She

refuses to be just a Chinese puppet in her mother's hand, and she decides

to put an end to this by confronting her mother: "'You want me to be

someone that I'm not!' I sobbed. 'I'll never be the kind of daughter you

want me to be!'"(142). Suyuan's response to this rebellious action

expresses her traditional Chinese ideas about filial piety which requires

from June to be obedient and never stand against her mother's will, she

says:

"Only two kinds of daughters," she shouted in Chinese. "Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughters!"(142)

She says these words in Chinese, emphasizing that it is a

perspective that comes from her Chinese background, and in this way she

marks the cultural gap between Chinese immigrant mother and Chinese

American daughter. Also Jing-mei reply to her mother's Chinese values

expresses her attitude as a child raised in America and follows her "own

mind", not the "obedient" Chinese daughter her mother wants her to be:

"Then I wish I wasn't your daughter! I wish you weren't my mother"

(142). It is the lack of understanding, caused by cultural/generation gap

that leads to these harsh words between them.

30

By this painful confrontation, Tan puts an end to this stage of

conflict; an end that marks the relationship between Jing-mei and her

mother with silence and separation. By doing so, June decides to which

part she belongs. She doesn't want to be like her mother. She rejects her

mother with all her unacceptable Chinese thoughts. She feels ashamed to

be a daughter of a Chinese mother. Consequently, she rejects her Chinese

ethnic roots and tries to avoid it by all costs, even at the expense of her

relation with her own mother. It is at this point that Jing-mei's struggle

with her ethnic identity starts and the question of to which ethnic group

does she belong accompanies her even at the age of 36, after her mother's

death, she remembers:

My mother said I was fifteen and had vigorously denied that I had any Chinese whatsoever below my skin…But today I realize I've never really known what it means to be Chinese. I'm thirty-six years old (267-68).

Even when her mother tells her that someday she will appreciate

that the Chinese part of her is in her blood, Jing-mei is horrified and

imagines a frightening picture of what is "Chinese" to her:

I saw myself transforming like a werewolf, a mutant tag of DNA suddenly triggered, replicating itself insidiously into a syndrome, a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors, all those things my mother did to embarrass me (267).

31

Now an adult, Jing-mei takes her mother's place at the mahjong

table "on the East, where things begin"(33), and she begins her journey

towards understanding her mother and her own self. In order to achieve

her mother's "long-cherished wish"(288), she agrees to travel to China to

meet her half sisters. It is only during this journey that Jing-mei changes

from being in denial of her ethnic roots to a truly understanding what is

her ethnic identity. She realizes that her mother was right when she says:

Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese. "Someday you will see" said my mother. "It is in your blood, waiting to be let go"(267).

When Jing-mei arrives in China, she sees many things that she did

not expect to see. For instance, when she opens the refrigerator in her

hotel room in Guangzhou, she finds that the refrigerator is "stocked with

Heineken beer, Coke Classic, and Seven-Up, mini-bottles of Johnnie

Walker Red, Bacardi rum, and Smirnoff vodka, and packets of M&M’s,

honey-roasted cashews, and Cadbury chocolate bars" (278) . Jing-mei is

astounded, because she expected China to be an exotically backward

communist country. These new findings, which include, but are not

limited to, some aspects of American mass culture, reshape Jing-mei's

perception of her Chinese identity: "And now I also see what part of me

is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood" (288).

In Family Plots: the de-Oedipalization of Popular Culture, Dana

Heller states that by visiting China Jing-mei "appears to bring the

narrative full circle, harmonizing East with West, the past with the

present…"(113). By traveling to China, she feels that her dormant

Chinese heritage becomes awake and becomes aware of it. She is

32

transformed from feeling inferior about her Chinese ethnicity to being

proud of it. As stated by Patricia L. Hamilton:

The journey encompasses Jing-mei's attempts not only to understand her mother's tragic personal history but also to come to terms with her own familial and ethnic identity (125).

In addition to discovering her own bonds with her mother and

with her ethnic self, Jing-mei brings hope to the other mothers in the

novel. They used to regard Jing-mei as an emblematic of their own

daughters. Thus, by accepting her Chinese heritage and travelling to her

mother's homeland, Jing-mei bridges two cultures, two generations, and

put an end to a long time of conflicts.

33

Another daughter who exemplifies the theme of ethnic identity and

conflicts in Tan's The Joy Luck Club is Waverly Jong. The role played

by ethnic identity in the struggle between Waverly and her mother is

unquestionable. Waverly's conception of her mother as a "backward old

Chinese woman"(255) intensifies her dilemma of ethnic identity. Like

the other Chinese American daughters in the book, Waverly desires to

hide her Chinese side and enhance the American one. She is pulled in

two directions by her Chinese heritage and American ways. Her mother

realizes this dilemma and comments:

All those years I tried to teach my daughter Waverly! She followed my Chinese ways only until she learned how to walk out the door by herself and go to school…but only her skin and her hair are Chinese. Inside- she is all American made (253-4).

Lindo's statement reflects her daughter's choice to be American

instead of Chinese. Despite being raised in Chinese family and grown up

with Chinese customs, Waverly chooses the American lifestyle. Like

many Americans, she attends the symphony, takes her daughter to the

Zoo, and treats her mother at lunch at an expensive restaurant. In this

way, Waverly achieves Lindo's concept of the American dream of

success. However, to Lindo's disappointment, she lost any interest in her

Chinese heritage. Moreover, she often seems embarrassed by her

Chinese mother, as Lindo puts it:

But inside I am becoming ashamed. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother but she is not proud of me (255).

34

Waverly's shame of her mother and her ethnic identity appears

clearly in the parlor scene. She feels upset by Mr. Rory's comment on

her similarity with her mother. She does not want to resemble her

Chinese mother. Furthermore, her conspiracy with her hairdresser to

have her mother's hair cut in an American style exemplifies the

assimilating imposition of the white mainstream American ideology on

the immigrants who are racial and ethnic minorities. Aligning herself

with such American thought of disregarding and stigmatizing her

mother's true identity and selfhood as a Chinese immigrant, Waverly

views her mother as "the outcast other" (Yin-Li Yu 188).

Unlike her daughter, Lindo takes great pride in being Chinese. In

response to her daughter’s mock-innocent question about "Chinese

torture," answers: "Chinese people do many things... Chinese people do

business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We

do torture. Best torture" (91). On the other hand, Waverly refuses to

adopt the traits of humility and respect Lindo has tried to teach her.

Instead, she has assimilated so thoroughly, positioning her self on "the

other side of a cultural divide from her mother"(Huntley 59). Lindo, who

wanted her daughter to have what she calls "American circumstances" in

addition to "Chinese character", blames her self that Waverly grew up

this way:

I taught her how American circumstances work…she learned these things but I couldn't teach her about Chinese character. How to obey parents and listen to your mother's mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantages of hidden opportunities…why Chinese thinking is best (254).

35

Like Jing-mei, Waverly spent a long period of her life trying to

avoid her ethnic roots and rebels against her mother who exemplifies it.

Although Tan portrays Waverly as opposite to Jing-mei and has been

diminishing her from childhood to adulthood, Waverly is powerless when

she faces her mother. She regards her mother as her "opponent" with

"two angry black slits", "wearing" a "triumphant smile" (100).

Like Jing-mei, Waverly decides to rebel against her mother, to put

an end to her mother's "show(ing) off"(99). Also here I'm going to trace

the struggle between the American-born Waverly Jong and her Chinese

immigrant mother Lindo Jong from childhood to adulthood, the moment

of reconciliation and acceptance of ethnic identity.

As a child, Waverly, unlike Jing-mei who fails her mother's

expectations, becomes a chess prodigy and is even featured in Life

magazine. Her Chinese mother is extremely proud of her accomplishment

and spares no opportunity to boast about her. She feels that she manages

to achieve her American dream of success through her daughter,

expecting, as in China, her daughter to obey her. But Waverly gets angry

when her mother, who knows nothing about the game, tries to tell her

how to play, and then takes credit for her successes. She resents her

mother’s ambitious and proud nature and decides to stop her: "I was

determined to put a stop to her foolish pride" (138).

Again, like Jing-mei and her mother, there is a pursing point, and

here it comes when Lindo accompanies Waverly, as usual, to the market

to do shopping. Although Lindo excuses Waverly from many tasks, she

cannot seem to get out of her weekly visits to the market with her mom

36

where her mother brags about her. Walking down the street, Lindo tells

everybody that Waverly is her daughter and that she is the national chess

champion. Waverly, who absorbs the American thoughts of

independence, feels so fed up with her Chinese mother, and in her anger

decides to put an end to all this:

Waverly: I wish you wouldn't do that, telling everyone I'm your daughter

Lindo: Aiii-ya. So shame be with mother?

Waverly: It's not that. It's just so obviousIt's just so embarrassing.

Lindo: Embarrassed you be my daughter?

Waverly: that's not what I meant. That's not what I said.

Lindo: what you say

Waverly: Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess? (99)

By saying these words, Waverly declares her refusal to her

mother's Chinese ways of thinking, for raising daughter in China is

completely different from doing so in America. Tan manages skillfully to

convey to us the inner turmoil of Waverly and her desire to escape her

mother's control in the next scene. After saying these hurtful words,

Waverly runs and knocks into a woman with a bag of groceries. As

Lindo helps the woman "pick up the escaping food" (99), when that bag

of groceries spills on the street, Waverly sees in "the escaping food" her

desire to be free from Lindo’s expectations. Waverly makes her escape

37

into one alley after another, only to understand that she has "nowhere to

go" and there are "no escape routes" (100).

The rift between Waverly and her mother begins at this point and

continues to widen through time. Lindo, the Chinese mother who once

sacrificed her life to keep her parent's promise, considers that pride in her

daughter's talent is natural, and she believes that a mother is entitled, or

should be, to share in her daughter's triumphs. Waverly, on the other

hand, sees that by doing so, her mother is trying to live through her and

thereby preventing her from a separate identity and a sense of individual

achievement (Huntley 49). It is apparent here that this clash between the

Chinese immigrant Lindo and her American born Waverly is not only

generational, but also cultural.

Like Suyuan Woo, and in fact many Chinese women, silence and

ignorance is Lindo's reaction. She decides to neglect Waverly as if she

does not exist, and she orders the rest of the family to ignore her: "This

girl not have concerning for us. We not concerning this girl" (100). After

that day, Waverly feels Lindo treats her like a "rotten fish she had thrown

away but which had left behind its bad smell" (170). According to

Lindo's traditional Chinese thinking, this is what a disobedient daughter

deserves.

On her part, affected by her mother's attitude, Waverly attempts to

irritate her and stop playing chess. She imagines that her mother will brag

for her to play again but her plan backfired, for Lindo did not seem to

mind, she also continues in her strategy of silence and ignorance.

Actually, it is Waverly who greatly missed playing chess, when she

decides to resume playing, she tells her mother: "I'm ready to play chess

38

again"(171), expecting that she will jump of joy, but she is shocked by

her mother's respond:

Why do you tell me that? You think it is so easy. One day quit, next day play. Everything for you is this way. So smart, so easy, so fast. It is not so easy anymore (172).

These words shakes Waverly's believe in herself, causing her to

stop playing chess any more at fourteen as she discovers that she lost her

magic touch. In this way, her mother wins over her. She tries to defeat

her Chinese mother by all means but in vain. The only way for Waverly

to avoid her mother's control over her is to distance herself from her

mother. Judith Arcana posits that:

Some daughters spend all or most of their energy trying futilely to be as different from their mothers as possible in behavior, appearance, relations with friends, lovers, children, husbands (qtd. in Bloom 24).

But Lindo's influence on Waverly is inescapable, she sees that her

life with her mother is like chess game (checker) in which her mother

vanquishes her. She sees herself as a pawn to her mother's queen, weaker

and younger:

In her hands, I always become the pawn. I could only run away. And she was the queen, able to move in all directions, relentless in her pure suit, always able to find my weakest spots (180).

39

Now Waverly is an adult, she is a highly successful tax attorney in

a high powered position; however, she becomes a child again in her

mother's presence. She still fears her mother’s disapproval. She has been

unable to bring herself to tell Lindo that she is about to remarry, for she

does not want to see her mother’s reaction. Lindo never liked her first

husband, and Waverly indirectly blames her for the failure of the

marriage, so she tries to protect herself and Rich, her fiancé, from her

mother's critical eye. She is afraid that her mother’s disapproval of Rich

will poison this second marriage as well, and that her mother will point

out Rich's flaws and turn him into something ordinary, one word at a

time, phrase by phrase, negative comment by negative comment "until his

looks, his character, his soul would have eroded away" (173). This is

what happened to Waverly's feelings for her first husband, Marvin Chen.

Lindo was always able to make Waverly change her mind, seeing flaws

where she once saw perfection, and she doesn't want this to happen with

Rich.

Tentatively, Waverly tries to promote a good impression of Rich

on Lindo's mind by arranging a dinner in her mother's house, but

unfortunately the dinner does not go well. After the dinner, Waverly

seems to look at Rich differently: "He looked so pathetic. So pathetic,

those words! My mother was doing it again, making me see black where

I once saw white" (179-80).

40

As Waverly finally summons sufficient courage and anger to tell

her mother that she has known Lindo's "scheming ways"(180) of making

her miserable, she is surprised to discover another side of the mother as

she looks at Lindo, sleeping on the sofa:

With her smooth face, she looked like a young girl, frail, guileless, and innocent. ... All her strength was gone. She had no weapons, no demons surrounding her. She looked powerless. Defeated (180).

Her perception of her mother has changed within seconds: "it

seemed, I had gone from being angered by her strength, to being amazed

by her innocence, and then frightened by her vulnerability" (180-81).

All her life, Waverly reads wrong meanings into her mother’s

words and creates a barrier between herself and Lindo, leading to

needless misunderstanding and tension between them. It is only When

she gains the courage to tell Lindo about her plans to marry Rich that she

realizes that she has misjudged her mother. Waverly thinks that her

mother could criticize her boyfriend because her mother is a

complaining and destructive woman who is hard to satisfy, but she fails

to realize that her mother is so proud of her that she thinks nobody is

good enough for her. She discovers that her mother loves her deeply and

wants her to be happy; as a result, she is very supportive of her plans to

remarry.

41

By the end of the novel, Waverly does come to understand Lindo

better and fear her less. She realizes that her mother is not a chess board

queen, planning a secret attack on her; she is an old, traditional woman

who wanted to be loved just as much as she loved her daughter. She had

only been waiting for her daughter to "invite her into" her world, and to

accept her Chinese heritage (184). Waverly says:

[I]n the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in (183-84).

As stated above, after listening to her mother, Waverly begins to

see her in a new light, and this is her first step towards accepting her

ethnic heritage. Quite hesitated, Waverly decides to take her mother on

her honeymoon and travel to China so that she, her mother, and her

husband Rich could all put aside their differences and turn over a new

leaf in their life. Beginning to admit her Chinese ethnic identity,

Waverly tells her mother that she is afraid that she will be mistaken for a

Chinese citizen and retained there:

"What if I blend in so well they think I'm one of them?" Waverly asks her mother, "What if they don't let me come back to the United States?" …Surprised, Lindo muses: "How can she think she can blend in? Only her skin and her hair are Chinese. Inside she is all American made" (253-54).

42

But the American made Waverly realizes that there is a fact she

couldn't escape. She is both Chinese-American. She must accept this

fact to live as a whole woman.

While, as a child, Waverly manages, to a certain degree, to escape

her mother's control by running away; Rose Hue Jordan's escape from

her Chinese mother's control during childhood takes place only in her

own dreams. Like Waverly, Rose is aware of the power of her mother's

words, but still she wants to free herself from her mother's intrusions.

The power of the mother's words and the rebellious nature of the daughter

are reflected in one of Rose's childhood nightmares. In the dream, Rose

was asked to pick a doll from the sandboxes in her backyard, and

knowing that her mother knows what she is going to choose, she

deliberately chooses a different doll, she remembers:

And my mother, who was not there but could see me inside out, told Old Mr. Chou she knew which doll I would pick. So I decided to pick one that was entirely different (186).

This dream indicates that the power of her mother over her is

deeply rooted in her subconscious, and her decision to pick a different

doll from the one her mother expects indicates Rose's desire to go against

her mother's expectation. Although it is just a dream, her desire for

autonomy, like Jing-mei and Waverly, is not without unpleasant

43

consequences: her nightmare ends with Old Mr. Chou, the guardian of a

door that opens into dreams according to her mother, chasing her and

shouting, at the request of her mother:

'Stop her! Stop her!' Cried my mother. As I tried to run away, Old Mr. Chou chased me, shouting, and `See what happens when you don't listen to your mother!' And I became paralyzed, too scared to move in any direction (186).

Thus, like her other American-born peers, Jing-mei & Waverly,

Rose spend her childhood trying to escape her Chinese mother's control,

and to limit her intrusions in her life even in her own dreams. Also, like

the other Chinese mothers, Suyuan& Lindo, An-mei tries hard to make

her daughter listen. She wants Rose to listen to the Chinese self within

her. It will never lead her into trouble. She diagnoses Rose's problem as

being "without wood," always "bending to listen," too often ignoring the

advices of her Chinese mother, so she advices her:

You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next o you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind and then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away (191).

Believing that marrying a Euro-American man would facilitate

her escape from her mother, and her mother's culture (Chinese culture),

and her entry to the mainstream culture, Rose considers her marriage with

the American Ted as a big chance. She admits that she is initially

44

attracted to Ted because he is different from her brothers and the Chinese

boys she has dated and that "his parents immigrated from Tarrytown,

New York, not Tientsin, China" (117). When her mother shows

disapproval of this relationship and says that "He is American," Rose

readily retorts, "I'm American too" (117).

In fact, it is not only An-mei who disapproves this marriage, but

also Ted's mother does not support it since she regards Rose as a

minority. As Rose explains, Mrs. Jordan tries to make her understand

that she is not the suitable wife for her son:

She assured me she had nothing against minorities… But Ted was going to be in one of those professions where he would be judged by a different standard, by patients and doctors who might not be as understanding as the Jordans were (118).

After marriage, Rose becomes a submissive and indecisive wife

who lets her savior-like Euro-American husband make all the decisions

for their family because she has the perception that the Americans have

better opinions on various matters (191). By doing so, Ted places Rose

within one of the prevalent American stereotypes of Chinese women,

which Ling refers to as the fragile "China Doll: demure, diminutive, and

deferential [. . .] devoted body and soul to serving ['her man']"(qtd. in

Bloom 130).

Accepting the position of victim, however, could not save Rose's

marriage, for Ted begins to blame her for never making decisions, and

45

ends up by deciding that he wants divorce. Again it he who makes

decisions and Rose is "paralyzed"(86) and unable to make a decision

about this problem and she feels an urgent need for help. However, she

seeks this help from friends and a psychiatrist instead of her mother. She

is unable to appreciate her mother's good intentions and prefers pouring

out personal problems to a stranger rather than to her mother, a thing that

upsets An-mei:

Why can you talk about this with a psyche-atric and not with mother?... A mother is best. A mother knows what is inside you… A psyche-atricks will only make you hulihudu, make you see heimongmong (188).

When her marriage with Ted Jordan ends in a divorce, Rose

becomes depressed. In a fit of introspection she acknowledges her

mistake. She had often let her mother's words "blow through" her. She

had often filled her mind with 'other peoples thoughts all - in English," so

that when her mother "looked at her inside out," she would be confused

by what she saw. Over the years she had learnt to choose American

opinion. In almost every case, she had felt that "the American version

was better" (191). But now, she is confused and unhappy. She spends

much time unable to make decision concerning her marriage and this

makes her discover that the American version of though is not the better

as she always believes, she finds out that there is a "serious flaw with the

American version…There were too many choices, so it was easy to get

confused and pick the wrong thing" (191). Her mother's words were

proving right. She had to return to her Chinese mother in order to

survive. Recalling her mother's words back home, she realizes that what

her mother says is true:

46

Back home, I thought about what she said. And it was true. Lately I had been feeling hulihudu. And everything around me seemed to be heimongmong. These were words I had never thought about in English terms. I suppose the closest in meaning would be "confused" and "dark fog." But really, the words mean more than that (188).

Just as Waverly hesitates to tell her mother that she is going to

remarry, Rose hesitates to tell her mother that she is about to get

divorced. Rose is certain that An-mei would ask her to save the

marriage, but it turns out that An-mei only asks her to "speak up",

something that An-mei has learnt from her childhood and her own

mother's tragedy (193). Without consciously knowing it, Rose begins to

adopt her mother's advice. She finally heeds An-mei's advice in standing

up firmly, makes her own decisions, talks to Ted in person instead of

outpouring grievances to the psychiatrist and her friends, as she

announces to Ted what she wants: "You can't just pull me out of your life

and throw me away" (196). By speaking up, Rose subverts the oppression

upon her, and discovers that she is transformed and empowered

internally. She is relieved as she sees Ted confused and scared: "He was

hulihudu. The power of my words was that strong" (196).

Acknowledging the power of her words, Rose connects herself to

An-mei, whose power of words is also strong, and discovers that they can

both possess their powers, which are not necessarily conflicting, but

complementary, as listening to her mother's words is not tantamount to

surrendering her own self. Rose's story ends with a new harmonious

dream, which is an opposite of her childhood nightmare where she is

chased by Old Mr. Chou for not listening to her mother, in which An-mei

47

plants some weeds, in the presence of the cheerful Old Mr. Chou, for

herself and Rose, who can now see through the heimonginong, and

embrace her mother's love, and by turn embrace her ethnic identity.

Quite different is Lena St.Clair's struggle over her ethnic identity.

Born of a Chinese mother and an English-Irish American father, Lena is

aware of her dual identity. Although she resembles more her Caucasian

father and has a non-Chinese last name St. Clair, her eyes, the part that

she gets from her mother ,are unmistakably Chinese :

And my eyes, my mother gave me my eyes, no eyelids, as if they were carved on a jack-o'-lantern with two swift cuts of a short knife. I used to push my eyes in on the sides to make them rounder. Or I'd open them very wide until I could see the white parts (104).

By doing so, Lena hopes to get rid of the terrible things she sees

with the Chinese eyes, as well as to dissociate herself from her Chinese

mother, who is paranoid and mysterious in her eyes. She does not tell

others about this mysterious ability, because most people do not know

she is half Chinese. When she goes into the street with Ying-ying, people

mistake Ying-ying for her maid because of their differences in

appearance. This signifies the inferior status of the Chinese ethnic

communities and explains Lena's inherent fear of resembling her mother.

Lena is very conscious of her difference from other purely Caucasian

girls and thus she tries to distinguish herself from her mother. Ying-ying

speaks of Lena's Americanized ways:

48

She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid (67).

Quite different also is the struggle between Lena and her mother

Ying-ying. To our surprise, it is Lena who is eager to conflict with her

soulless mother to feel that her mother is, at least, alive. In fact, Lena is a

victim of her mother's passivity. All her life it is Lena who tries to save

her Chinese mother. The relationship between them is noticeably

different from the other pairs in the novel since ying-ying never tries to

meddle with Lena's life; instead, she maintains an estranged distance

from her daughter. Their alienation is not simply brought upon by the

daughter's intention to get away from her Chinese mother, but is also

coupled with the mother's self-entrapment in the past horrifying

memories. Ying-ying's abnormal silence and paranoia deny Lena the

opportunity to develop a close relationship with her. Ying-ying St. Clair

laments the estrangement from Lena:

When she (Lena) was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore (242).

Away from her attempts to scar Lena with a superstitious Chinese

tales in order to protect her, during childhood there were no specific

confrontation or struggles between Lena and her mother, unlike Waverly

and Jing-mei. As a child, Lena feels that she is watching her mother

being "devoured" piece by piece by the terrors "until she(Ying-ying)

49

disappeared and became a ghost" (103). Lena sees her mother not only

as a stranger, but also as a mysterious person who is "displaced" in

America and sees "danger in everything" (105).

The adult Lena marries a rich husband and lives in a fanciful house

but underneath she is fed up with her husband's insistence on the concept

of "equal share" for their household expenses and bitter at his lack of

appreciation of her role as both a wife and a partner at their company

(64). Though she knows her marriage problem, she does not take the

initiatives to seek for solutions because in her heart, she treats her

marriage to Harold as atonement for her childhood mistake, which was

made because of a warning from Ying-ying. When Lena is eight, her

mother warned her that she would marry a bad man with pock marks in

the future if she leaves rice on her bowl. She misinterprets her mother's

warning and thinks of a neighbor boy whom she hates so much that she

wishes him dead as her future husband. The boy dies in his teens and

Lena thinks she has caused his death and she believes that she is destined

to marry Arnold, the boy who is dead, and therefore she marries Harold:

"I still feel that somehow, for the most part, we deserve what we get. I

didn't get Arnold. I got Harold" (155).

Again, Lena is desperate to hide her unsatisfying marriage from

Ying-ying, but her mother, who always has the ability to see through

things, in particular her daughter, has spotted bad signs and omens.

Then, as they spend time together in the new house, Lena discovers that

Ying-ying is the only one who knows that she cannot eat ice cream

because of a childhood trauma. Ying-ying's maternal concern is touching,

while on the other hand Lena is startled that her husband, Harold, has

50

never noticed she does not eat ice cream after they have been living

together for many years:

"Lena cannot eat ice cream," says my mother. "So it seems. She's always on a diet". "No, she never eat it. She doesn't like". And now Harold smiles and looks at me puzzled, expecting me to translate what my mother has said. "It's true," I say evenly. "I've hated ice cream almost all my life" (162-63).

By identifying with her mother, Lena admits there is something

wrong with her husband's rigid financial policy, and starts to reassess her

relationship with Harold. She also begins to realize that her mother,

despite her seeming careless, understands that she is unhappy and tries to

help her. In other words, she discovers that Ying-ying never gives up her

role as a loving and caring mother.

Drawing from what has been highlighted above, it appears that

despite their attempt to reject the Chinese ways and to embrace western

ways, the American-born immigrants in Tan's The Joy Luck Club finally

realize that they cannot completely escape their Chinese heritage. Their

struggle is to find a way to combine these in their own lives- a struggle

for personal balance. To achieve a balance in the between world

condition then, according to Tan, one cannot cling solely to the new

American ways and reject the old Chinese ways. One must reconcile the

two.

51

Narrative Techniques

I choose my words carefully, with much anguish. They are, each and every one, significant to me, by virtue of their meaning, their tone, their place in the sentence, their sound and rhythm in dialogue or narrative.

(The Opposite of Fate 301)

Narrative techniques are means by which the author creates

meaning through language, and by which readers gain understanding of,

and appreciation for his work. In this way, narrative techniques are very

important aspects of an author's style.

In The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, and The Hundred

Secret Senses, Amy Tan employs various narrative techniques such as

linguistic differences, symbols, and the Chinese traditional Talk-Story, to

convey her theme of ethnic identity and the cultural-generational conflicts

that erupt in the Chinese-American immigrant families.

52

In my analysis of Tan's three novels, I'll begin with linguistic

difference since it is the main stimulus for using talk-story. In these

novels, The Chinese immigrant mothers find difficulty in communicating

with their American-born daughters due to language barriers. But at the

same time they are in an urgent need to speak to "achieve various ends"

(Shen 12). Thus, Tan resorts to the next technique, talk-story, a familiar

and traditional method derived from her own culture, as their most

appropriate tool for "killing secret(s)" (Wenying 88). Besides linguistic

differences and talk-story, Tan employs an "interlocking networks of

symbols" (Singer 98), to reinforce her themes.

53

Linguistic Differences

The use of language functions not only as a means of communicative expression, but often it is a marker or indicator of the speaker's ethnic or cultural identity.

(Fong 11)

The crucial role played by language in Amy Tan's three novels:

The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's wife, and The Hundred Secret

Senses, is crystal clear. In these novels, Tan employs linguistic

differences to reinforce her theme of ethnic identity and conflicts by

portraying characters that are unable to communicate, and sometimes

misinterpret each other, due to linguistic barriers. As stated by Huntley:

Lacking a shared language and a common cultural tongue, Tan's mothers and daughters face each other across the communication barrier that not only divides generations but also separates the old world and the new, the immigrant and the American-born … the immigrant generation has created its own speech, a patois that incorporates Chinese and English words in a syntax that is derived

54

from both languages and produces rich meanings of its own (46).

But this special language on the part of the Chinese immigrants is a

source of shame for their American-born daughters. Because, for Chinese

(and other ethnic) immigrants, the inability to speak standard,

grammatically correct English marginalizes these immigrants and

separates them from the dominant discourse. Anyone who cannot speak

perfect American English is accused of speaking broken English or

limited English, and this is a sign of minority. Amy Tan herself points

out in The Opposite of Fate that she used to look down on her own

mother, who is a limited English speaker, as she mistakenly believed her

mother's fractured English reflects the inferiority of her mother's

thoughts, that is "because she expressed them imperfectly, her thoughts

were imperfect" (274).

Though it is clear that cultural issues play the major role in the

distance between mother and daughter in these novels and affect their

acceptance of their ethnic identities, on one level the trouble with cross-

cultural communication is purely linguistic. Through psychological

studies of Chinese Americans, May Paomay Tung has concluded:

The vast difference between these two linguistic traditions [Chinese and English], plus the language barrier, marks the distance between the young Chinese Americans and their immigrant parents. This distance and its effect on parent-child relationships and on Chinese American self- identity cannot be overstressed (74).

55

They are literally speaking two different languages. This

observation is a key to understanding the development of ethnic identities

in these novels. In "Sugar Sisterhood": Situating the Amy Tan

Phenomenon, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong states that:

The preponderance of short, choppy sentences and the frequent omission of sentence subjects are oft-used conventions whereby the Chinese can be recognized as Other (62).

Because Tan’s educational background is in linguistics, the

preoccupation with language in her novels cannot be purely coincidental.

Bearing in mind that language is not just a mean of representing or

conveying information, not just an instrument of communication, but, as

François G.Grosjean points out in Life With Two Languages, a "symbol

of social or group identity"(qtd. in Oster 59), Amy Tan uses language in

her novels as an important aspect of cultural differences that causes

conflicts and complicate the dilemma of ethnic identity among her

immigrant characters. She uses linguistic differences to show the

displacement of her Chinese immigrant women characters in the

American society.

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The Joy Luck Club

The role played by language in The Joy Luck Club is set in the

prologue of the first section of the story when a Chinese mother decides

to wait until she will be able to speak "perfect American English" to

explain to her daughter the meaning of the feather and the "good

intentions" that it carries(17). However, after decades of living in

America, the mothers, unlike their daughters, still not perfect American

English speakers. They keep their own stories and unable to communicate

appropriately with their daughters. They make a lot of mistakes when

they communicate in English with their daughters.

It is due to their linguistic disabilities that the Chinese immigrant

mothers keep the precious treasure of reminiscences, wisdom, and stories

about their tragedies in China, and hence prevent their daughters from

this source of empowerment. Also, the silence of the mothers due to

linguistic barriers make their daughters misinterpret them, they think that

their mothers are just tardy old women. In Hanyu at The Joy Luck Club,

Steven P. Sondrup remarks that:

57

The mastery of American English at the expense of mandarin is no warrant of happiness, but rather a source of misunderstanding and at least transitory alienation. To learn American English is to rebel against traditional Chinese cultural expectations and to resist, forget, or suppress the official language in which they are embedded (37).

Through the character of the American-born Jing-mei and her

Chinese immigrant mother Suyuan woo, I'm going to show how Amy

Tan uses linguistic differences to help conveying her theme of ethnic

identity and struggle in The Joy Luck Club.

At the beginning of the novel, we see Jing-mei taking her mother's

place at the mahjong table. While playing, the old women start to talk in

their special language which is described by Jing-mei as "half in broken

English, half in their own Chinese dialect"(34). This scene is portrayed

more clearly in the film adaptation of the novel. As they start to play,

Jing-mei cautions them not to speak Chinese while playing because she

cannot understand them so they may take advantage of this in cheating

her: "Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. No talking in Chinese - How do I know

you're not cheating?" (Wang 00:07:19). If Jing-mei is unable to

understand her aunties', and by turn her mother's, mother tongue, how can

she communicate appropriately with her own mother? The answer to this

question is stated by Jing-mei early in the novel:

My mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did. I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese….We translated each other's

58

meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more (33-7).

As known, translation from one language into another requires

intimate knowledge of the language and the culture it is bound up with.

And since Jing-mei is unable, or more accurately unwilling, to understand

neither her mother's language nor the culture it represents, there is always

misunderstanding and miscommunication between them. To convey

meaning appropriately from the Chinese language into the American

English through translation, one should know first some basic

information about the Chinese culture, a thing that Jing-mei unwilling to

do. The Chinese culture, for example, is a culture in which little is

explicitly stated in words in conversations, little words mean too much

meaning. The American culture, on the other hand, is a culture that

requires explanations, is one in which information and meanings are

explicitly stated in the message or communication. In this case, when the

Chinese Suyuan holds a conversation with the American Jing-mei,

Suyuan "hear(s) more" than what is said by Jing-mei, who, according to

her American culture, "hear(s) less". In this way, Tan uses language in

her novel as a narrative technique for, as Heung puts it, "playing out

cultural differences"(24).

In addition to playing out cultural difference, Tan uses linguistic

differences in The Joy Luck Club to highlight the issue of ethnic identity.

In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua relates language to identity

saying: "Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my

language"(qtd. in Oster 89). For this reason, the daughters in The Joy

Luck Club regard their mothers' language as a characteristic of their

59

minority state, a mark of their ethnic identity which they reject and try to

avoid by all costs. When they mature and begin to accept their ethnic

heritage, they also appreciate their mother's language, as stated by Jing-

mei at the end of the novel to her father, who begins to complete her

mother's story in English: "No, tell me in Chinese…Really I can

understand"(281).

To conclude, the use of language is, in Mary Fong's words,

"strongly tied to the feelings of ethnic identity and belonging"(56). And

In The Joy Luck Club, Tan, to empower and enrich her theme,

incorporates all the different sorts of Englishes she grows up with:

the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as `simple'; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as `broken'; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as `watered down'; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. (Fate 278-79)

60

Talk-Story

All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore. And now I must tell her everything about my past. It is the only way to penetrate her skin and pull her to where she can be saved.

(The Joy Luck Club 242)

Gong gu tsai or talk-story is a Chinese oral tradition. It is a type of

oral storytelling, appeared first in the literature of Chinese American

women writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Fae Myenne Ng, and

Amy Tan. This oral tradition has been practiced and developed in China

for more than two thousand years from the time when most people were

illiterate and the main way of bestowing knowledge and information was

through word of mouth till the present day when written documents are

prevalent.

The talk-story tradition is especially central to Chinese women’s

culture. Historically denied an education, women could use talk-story to

learn history, religion, literature, and filial duty, while developing a

61

strong sense of identity. The tradition has carried over to Chinese

America. Cheng Lok Chua writes about how, in The Woman Warrior

Kingston uses the form to claim an ethnic voice and thus an identity. The

women of Tan’s novels do the same thing. In fact, as Steven Sondrup

points out, the fact that neither daughter can read Chinese puts a special

emphasis on this oral aspect of the culture.

With the huge amount of writings about Asian American literature

in general, and Amy Tan in particular, there is no specific definition of

talk-story. This may be because, being a Chinese tradition, the term

appears awkward in English. A number of critics have decided that talk-

story is a literal translation of the Chinese term Gong gu tsai that is, the

activity of storytelling, of passing down tales from one generation to

another. The most comprehensive definition of talk-story I came across

is that provided by Linda Ching Sledge, who defines it as:

A conservative, communal folk art by and for the common people, performed in the various dialects of diverse ethnic enclaves and never intended for the ears of non-Chinese. Because it served to redefine an embattled immigrant culture by providing its members immediate, ceremonial access to ancient lore, talk story retained the structures of Chinese oral wisdom (parables, proverbs, formulaic description, heroic biography, casuistical dialogue) long after other old-country traditions had died (qtd. in Huntley 32).

Another definition is given by E.D Huntley in Amy Tan: A Critical

Companion. Huntley defines talk-story as a "felicitous combination of

62

genres from Chinese oral tradition articulated in local vernaculars in

narrative form"(14). While Wendy Ho describes it as "an eclectic feast of

living language, culture, memory, and affiliations that brings us to more

intimate knowledge of each other and our many identities in the diverse

communities and daily locations we inhabit" (13) . Ho goes on to state

some characteristics of this oral tradition, she says:

These talk-stories often come by necessity with a complicated vocabulary of rupture-heavy sighs, silences, trembling lips, downcast eyes, weeping, and wringing of hands-The 'disease' of the great unsaids (19).

Clearly, these definitions have almost a common agreement that

talk-story is a strategy for transmitting cultural values and traditions, and

thus is a mean for preserving ethnic heritage. Anyway, what ever its

meaning, by talk-story here I'm referring to the immigrant mothers' (and

older sister's) unburdening of the past stories and secrets so that their

American born daughters (and American young sister) absorb their ethnic

identities and are empowered by their past.

Of course, Tan's use of talk-story in her novels is not haphazard;

she employs it for many reasons, and to achieve different proposes. Ben

Xu writes that in Tan’s novels, ethnic awareness as given by mother-

stories provides a context for understanding ethnic identity and

"represents a higher form of self or self awareness"(16). Xu also states

that the "only means available for mothers to ensure ethnic continuity is

to recollect the past and tell tales of what is remembered"(3). This role

played by talk-story in "ensuring ethnic continuity" is also supported by

Gloria Shen who says:

63

The sharing of cultural experience between mother and daughter through the device of storytelling transforms the naïve, self-protective daughters, who try hard to move away from, or surpass, their ethnic roots, into the mature daughters who are appreciative of their mothers' Chinese ways. Through storytelling, the daughters come to accept their mothers' and their own race and are willing to seek their ethnic and cultural roots (Shen 14).

Also, talk-story is used by Tan's characters to link their Chinese

past with their American present. It is, as Huntley puts it, a device

employed by the characters "for shaping their histories and making

coherent sense of the significant events of their lives" (12). The mothers

in Tan's selected novels use talk-story to provide their daughters with a

connection to Chinese culture as well as a method for passing on their

personal values and advice. Huntley comments:

In their attempts to explain their lives to their daughters, the mothers in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife and Kwan in The Hundred Secret Senses draw on traditional oral forms to shape their stories and to disguise the urgency and seriousness with which they are attempting to transmit to their daughters (or a much younger sister in Kwan's case) the remnants of a culture that is fading even from their own lives (23).

As a result of listening to their mothers' stories, the daughters take

action in their own lives by taking control of circumstances and, most

importantly, accepting the hyphenated, bi-cultural role of Asian

American. It is through talk-story that Jing-mei in The Joy Luck Club

64

accepts her ethnic identity. Also Pearl in The Kitchen God's Wife

responds to her mother's tale by revealing a secret of her own. And it is

through Kwan's tales to Olivia in The Hundred Secret Senses that the

latter reconciles with her husband and embraces her Chinese heritage.

Melani McAlister comments:

Once the stories of the past are told, the younger generation can no longer see their mothers as artifacts, as misfits, whose unaccountable 'craziness' makes their young American lives miserable. The breaking of silence through stories positions the mothers as subjects of their own histories; in so doing, it restructures the relationship between mother and daughter (12).

Communication is another function of talk-story in Tan's selected

novels. Actually, talk-story is an important communicative tool between

the mothers and daughters since, through the engagement in this

interactive and dynamic activity, they both come to terms with their

relationship and their own identities. Besides, talk-story helps the

mothers to overcome the communication difficulties caused by linguistic

barriers. Telling a story in their native language allows the first

generation Chinese immigrant women to communicate with daughters

who understand spoken Chinese but can not read it.

Another important function of talk-story in Tan's novels is related

to the women who talk-stories; as they retell their traumatized

experiences they feel relieve as they throw away their heavy burdens that

they carry all these years. Wendy Xu comments on the function of talk-

story as a healing factor in Amy Tan's selected novels:

65

In all three novels, it is through talk-story that conflicts are resolved, love and trust are resorted, and secrets are finally shared. Almost all of the mothers in both The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife resort to the power of talk story to mend the rift between them and their thoroughly Americanized daughters(368).

The appropriateness of talk-story in Tan's selected novels is also

related to a very important point; that is this technique is an activity

largely linked to women because it flourished in domestic settings in old

times. In male-dominated societies where women were silenced and

excluded from public forms of involvement, women start to gather

together and draw power from talk, form generating gossips - an earlier

form of storytelling.

Also, the Chinese society is one of the most male-dominated

societies in which women were not allowed to express themselves but

just obey as expressed by one of Tan's women, An-mei, "…I was raised

the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's

misery, to eat my own bitterness"( Joy 215), and also stated in Ying-

ying's Amah words "Haven't I taught you-that it is wrong to think of your

own needs? A girl can never ask, only listen" (Joy 70). And because her

novels depend mainly on Chinese women characters who suffered a lot in

these communities, Tan's use of talk-story as a narrative technique helps

her to convey her meanings and reinforce her ideas in a unique and

skillful way. E.D. Huntley explains:

Talk story enables women who have been socialized into silence for most of their lives--the Joy Luck mothers, for instance--to

66

reconfigure the events of those lives into acceptable public utterances… More significantly, the act of performing talk story allows the storyteller to retain a comfortable distance between herself and her audience. Thus, the storyteller manages in some fashion to maintain the silence to which she is accustomed, as well as to speak out and share with others the important stories that have shaped her into the person that she is (24).

Simply put, ethnicity is not passed along by genes like hair and eye

colors are. It is absorbed through immersion in a culture and through

interaction with family. When this process is disrupted for Tan's daughter

characters, they are left not quite whole. Through their mothers' stories,

the daughters are able to come to terms with their Chinese heritage and

begin to construct an integrated identity. In this way, talk-story tradition

is an essential component in the formation of a Chinese ethnic identity.

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T he Joy Luck Club

Drawing from what has been highlighted so far, talk story, in many

aspects, meets the need of the mothers in Tan's The Joy Luck Club. They

try to transmit their cultural heritage to their daughters to help them

embrace their ethnic identities, and thereby resolve the conflicts between

them. The Chinese mothers start telling the daughters their stories after

the death of their friend, Suyuan Woo. They fear that their daughters

would continue growing into complete strangers, like Jing-mei who is

ignorant of her mother's history and personality. They realize this

terrible fact when they ask Jing-mei to travel to China and meet her half

sisters and tell them about their mother, she says:

See my sisters, tell them about my mother…What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don't know anything. She was my mother (40).

Horrified of her answer, An-mei says: "Not know your own

mother? …How can you say? Your mother is in your bones!" (40)

Unless, the mothers act quickly, their daughters will never understand

them and will not have any Chinese thinking to pass to their own

children. And therefore, the mothers of The Joy Luck Club decide to talk

to their daughters before it is too late. As they have learnt from their

68

own mothers, they would like to leave some precious legacy for their

later generations. Lindo tells of her worries at the beginning of The Red

Candle:

It's too late to change you, but I'm telling you this because I worry about your baby. I worry that someday she will say, 'Thank you, Grandmother, for the gold bracelet. I'll never forget you. 'But later, she will forget her promise. She will forget she had a grandmother (49).

As a result, the mothers decide to tell stories about their lives, in

the hope that their daughters will no longer be strangers to them. Also,

the mothers want to provide a cultural connection for their daughters, and

they know the only way they can pass those values to their American-

born children is to tell them about their pasts.

In this way, it is the mothers who talk stories as it inherited from

their own traditional Chinese culture. Losing hope in their ability to

convey "all their good intensions" to their daughters in "perfect American

English"(17), they resort to their traditional cultural traditions to

communicate their experiences to their daughters despite the language

barriers. We have four mothers, four stories full of wisdom and power.

Among them, An-mei & Ying-ying stories are ,I see, the most effective

one's as it drives their daughters into taking action in their own lives and

give them strength and spirit to do things they were unable to do and to

reclaim their own selves. Gloria Shen points out:

The mothers also resort to storytelling when trying to impart daily truths and knowledge

69

to the daughters. Through storytelling, they hope to help their daughters rise above negative circumstances or simply avoid unknown dangers (12).

Suyuan Woo's talk-story

Jing-mei's relationship with her mother, Suyuan Woo, can be used

as an archetype to demonstrate how Tan employs talk-story to resolve

conflicts between Chinese mother and American-born daughter. In the

stories, "The Joy Luck Club" and "A Pair of Tickets," Jing-mei tells of her

mother's quest for her lost daughters in China. Recalling her mother's

ability to tell her the Kweilin story with a different ending each time,

Jing-mei one day discovers the true version of the story. It is the story of

how her mother escaped from Kweilin to Chungking during the Japanese

invasion of China in 1944. On her way, the mother becomes so

exhausted that she has to leave behind her belongings one by one. At

last, she gives up her two baby girls. After the mother is rescued, she

begins her ceaseless search for her lost daughters. However, Jing-mei's

mother does not succeed: she dies without seeing her daughters again.

Suyuan's talk-story serves the purpose of conveying truths to her

daughter, and the story's ever-changing endings refers to the fact that

Suyuan withholds certain information as she is not able to relive the

traumatic experience all at once and, she also waits patiently for the time

when her daughter would truly understand its significance.

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Unfortunately, Suyuan does not have time to tell Jing-mei the

whole story and thus it remains the daughter's task to discover the whole

truth of her mother's tragic past. Prompted by Jing-mei's ultimate-found

enthusiasm to listen to her mother's stories, Jing-mei's father, Canning

Woo retells Suyuan's story to her on behalf of the mother. From her

father's recollections, Jing-mei finds out that her mother has given her the

Chinese name "Jing-mei" - "Jing" means pure essence and "mei" means

"younger sister" as in "meimei" - because it embodies her mother's long-

cherished wish: "Me, the younger sister who was supposed to be the

essence of the others" (281). The name embodies the hopes of Suyuan,

who, plagued with guilt for abandoning her daughters, hopes for the best

for Jing-mei, who is "supposed to be the essence of the others" (281).

As Jing-mei travels with her father to China to meet her lost half-

sisters, the "Chinese fairy tale"(25) in the young Jing-mei's mind finally

turns into a realistic story as she finds out more about her mother and

realizes her mother's love, strength, and power. By looking at her

sisters' faces, Jing-mei discovers the part of hers which is Chinese. As

they look at a Polaroid photo they take at the airport, the three sisters

marvel at how they look like their mother and how familiar they look to

one another:

And although we don't speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in

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surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish (288).

Jing-mei finally recognizes her Chinese roots and reunites with her

half-sisters, who symbolize the Chinese parts in her and make her

identify with her family and her Chinese blood. To Jing-mei, her half

sisters serve the function of a mirror in which she could see through and

go into her mother's past. By meeting them on behalf of her mother, Jing-

mei completes her mother's dream and reconciles the two worlds and

cultures which have been driving them apart. In Jing-mei's mind, Suyuan

is transformed from a distant, critical, and unrealistic mother who bears

high hopes for the daughter, to a caring mother with enduring love and

strength. Jing-mei is finally able to reconstruct the Chinese part of

herself, identify herself with her mother, and reclaim her mother's past as

part of her own.

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An-mei's talk-story

Learnt from her mother, An-mei is horrified by the catastrophic

consequences that being silent, meek, and passive may bring. In

Magpies, An-mei recounts her mother's tragic story in China, which

teaches her the destructive consequences that could be brought about if

one swallows one's tears and sorrows, as her mother has done:

Now you see… Your tears don't wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears (217).

Through her talk-story, we know that An-mei's mother is a typical

tragic example of the entrapment of women in China. She is a widow

who is cunningly raped by Wu Tsing, a rich man in Tientsin, and is thus

forced to become his concubine to hide the shame, given the few options

she has in old patriarchal China. Because of this, An-mei's grandmother

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(Popo) disowns her and tells An-mei that her mother is a ghost: "When I

was a young girl in China, my grandmother told me my mother was a

ghost" (42).

After the death of Popo, An-mei stays with her mother in Wu

Tsing's large house, where An-mei learns from a maid about how her

mother is forced to become a concubine and to bear a son, who is

claimed by a higher-ranking wife of Wu Tsing as her own. Deeply

sympathetic with her mother's misery, An-mei is also angry that her

mother does not speak up for herself:

I wanted my mother to shout at Wu Tsing, to shout at Second Wife, to shout at Yan Chang and say she was wrong to tell me these stories. But my mother did not even have the right to do this. She had no choice (238).

Though An-mei's mother cannot physically and verbally protest

against the unfair treatment and limited space for women in old China,

she attempts to render her daughter a stronger spirit by killing her own

weak spirit. It is also on this day that An-mei learns not to swallow her

tears and sorrows: she crashes the fake pearl necklace, given by Second

Wife, under her feet; and learns to shout. An-mei is empowered by her

mother's death and sacrifice as she learns the importance of speaking up

and being active. As Walter Shear notes:

An-mei seems to see in her own mother's suicide how to use the world for her own advantage. She not only traces how her mother makes the Chinese cultural beliefs work for her…but also she realizes almost

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immediately the acute significance of the words of her mother who tells her 'she [the mother] would rather kill her own weak spirit so she could give me a stronger one' (240).

Seeing that the meek and indecisive Rose squeezes tears and tells a

psychiatrist of her marriage problems, An-mei decides that it is time to

tell Rose her mother's story and the lessons she has learnt because she

knows it is the moment that her past story would sink into her daughter's

mind. She resents her daughter's weakness in contrast to her own

endurance in working things out:

Yesterday my daughter said to me, "My marriage is falling apart". And now all she can do is watch it falling. She lies down on a psychiatrist couch, squeezing tears out about this shame. And, I think, she will lie there until there is nothing more to fall, nothing left to cry about, everything dry (215).

By telling Rose her past story, An-mei hopes to render Rose a

strong spirit, like the one she gets on the day of her mother's death and

thus prompts Rose to speak up and shout at Ted, make decisions, and

stop pouring out her tears to the psychiatrist. As Rose starts to absorb

her mother's stories, she is empowered by her grandmother's tragic story,

An-mei's lessons, and is able to claim An-mei's past as part of her own

and stand up to Ted. She refuses to sign the divorce papers and move out

of their home, she says to him:

You can't just pull me out of your life and throw me away… I saw what I wanted: his eyes, confused, then scared. He was hulihudu. The power of my words was that strong (196).

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By talking-story, An-mei as a mother impresses on her daughter

the strength and courage that she as a daughter receives from her

mother's suffering. She achieves different goals; helps her daughter to

rise above her negative circumstances, initialize a new attempt of

communication with her, and most important, passes part of her Chinese

ethnic heritage to her American-born daughter.

Ying-ying's talk-story

The story of Ying-ying St.Clair and her daughter Lena is perhaps

the most "evocative" example of the power of talk story (McAlister 11).

Ying-ying's silence is initiated with the abortion of her unborn baby in

China, leaving herself with endless remorse and a mental breakdown.

She considers it a shame and keeps this secret from her daughter in

America, where she leads a new life without her chi, the spirit she once

has when she is young. Throughout the years, she maintains a superficial

and distant relation with Lena. As Lena grows up, Ying-ying realizes

the destructive effect of silence as both she and Lena have lost spirits:

All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me ... And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others (67).

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Upon seeing Lena's offhand attitude towards her falling-apart

marriage, Ying-ying decides that it is time to release her secret and

release the tiger spirit in Lena: "And now I must tell her everything about

my past. It is the only way to penetrate her skin and pull her to where she

can be saved" (242).

Staying in the guest room in Lena's house, Ying-ying retells her

past stories in interior monologue and it is clear that she has not talked-

story to Lena yet. She is firstly recollects her past memories and thinks

about what she should do to save Lena. Towards the end of the narration

of her stories, Ying-ying decides that this is what she will do:

I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. The pain that cut my spirit loose. ...And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter (252).

Through talk story, Ying-ying articulates her story of pain, loss,

grief, and rage and resurrects her past experiences to connect to the

present. As she recalls her memories, she remembers the wish she would

like to tell the Moon Lady on the day when she gets lost: "I wished to be

found" (83). Her wish is finally granted, not by the Moon Lady, but by

her own acceptance of her traumatic past, her strength to tell her daughter

her shame and guilt, and her maternal love for her daughter who has an

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empty marriage, something she is able to tell because of her ability to see

things before they happen.

With the empowerment of talk-story, Lena would be able to

translate her mother's tragic stories into her present life and thus she

could envision her mother in a new light and re-establish the relationship

with her mother. In other words, ying-ying's talk story is powerful

enough to penetrate Lena's skin and to overcome her insensitivity

towards Chinese ways of thinking.

Lindo Jong's talk-story

Lindo's talk-story is one in which she recalls her past experiences

in China to show how, unlike her daughter, she was proud of her mother.

As Waverly takes her to a beauty parlor and the hair stylist says: "it's

uncanny how much you two look alike!"(255), a remark that displeases

Waverly, Lindo looks at the mirror and wonders at the likeness of the two

faces: "The same happiness, the same sadness, the same good fortune, the

same faults"(256). Her own daughter appears to be ashamed and that

hurts her too much and makes her wonder why she grew up this way.

And she is prompted to take a journey back to her past to indicate that

she deserves her daughter's love and appreciation, she laments:

But inside I am becoming ashamed. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my

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daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother but she is not proud of me (255).

Through talk-story, Lindo recounts her earlier hardships and

explains the circumstances that have shaped her personality. When she

was two years old, she was promised to Tyan-yu, the spoiled son of a

woman named Huang Taitai. At the age of twelve, a flood ruined her

family's house and crops forcing her to move in with the Huang's before

marrying Tyan-yu as her family "had no choice but to move to

Wushi"(53). Form the first day, Huang Taitai and her son treated her

like a servant. She learned to be an obedient wife and never to think of

her own needs or dreams, she remembers:

Huang Taitai hurried me upstairs to the second floor and into the kitchen, which was a place where family children didn't usually go. This was a place for cooks and servants. So I knew my standing (55).

At sixteen, her wedding day comes. As she dresses, she sees her

reflection in the mirror. She suddenly becomes aware of her own

strength: "I would always remember my parents' wishes, but I would

never forget myself "(51). When a candle ceremony is performed to

ensure a lasting marriage, she secretly blows out her husband's flame,

which is a strong act of rebellion:

I was not thinking when my legs lifted me up and my feet ran me a cross the country yard to the yellow-lit room. But I was hoping-I was praying to Buddha, the goddess of mercy, and the full moon- to make that candle go out. It fluttered a little

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and the flame bent down low, but still both ends burned strong. My throat filled with so much hope that it finally burst and blew out my husband's end of the candle (60).

The marriage turns out to be miserable and Mrs. Huang is very

displeased with the lack of grandchildren. After a while, Lindo develops

an escape plan that would save her family’s honor and free her from

Tyan-yu. She makes up stories to make the Huangs believe that the dead

ancestors, who have a firm hold on the living, have doomed the marriage.

The Huangs are frightened and Lindo is set free. They give her enough

money for "passage to America" (Snodgrass 67).

In Double Face, Lindo retells stories of how she situates herself in

America, amid the problems of cultural and linguistic differences,

through strength and scheming. In retelling her stories, Lindo corrects

the stereotypical thinking of Waverly; she also explains to Waverly the

hidden wishes she has in the naming of Waverly:

And that's why I named you Waverly. It was the name of the street we lived on. And I wanted you to think, this is where I belong. But I also knew if I named you after this street, soon you would grow up, leave this place, and take a piece of me with you (265).

At the end of this story, Lindo manages to initiates a mutual

understanding with her daughter. And now it is Waverly who marvel at

how alike they are as they look at their reflections in the mirror. In other

words, by retelling her past, Lindo transforms it into a "celebration of

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courage and resistance"(Heung 26), and by listening to it, Waverly

becomes able to see her mother with a new appreciating eye. She learns

to accept her mother, and by turn, her ethnic identity. Lindo's emphasis

on her family history eventually leads Waverly to identify with her

mother and reminds her that "if you are Chinese you can never let go of

China in your mind" (183).

In a nut shell, Talk-story serves to ensure ethnic identity and to

bridge both the cultural and generational gap between mothers and

daughters in The Joy Luck Club. Listening to their mothers' tales

provides the daughters with a connection to their mothers' histories,

which also are a part of their own heritage. The daughters then engage in

self-exploration by applying their mothers' wisdom to their own lives.

As a result, the daughters not only learn to appreciate their mothers'

culture but they recognize that it is a part of their own Asian-American

identity. In other words, the mothers' China stories help to give their

daughters a sense of ethnic identity. Despite remaining problems, the

mothers' storytelling awakens the daughters' sensibility of racial identity.

By paying attention to the mothers' stories and by accepting their

mothers, the daughters reveal their willingness to accept Chinese culture

as their ethnic identity.

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Symbols

Amy Tan employs culturally specific figurative language and symbolism to entice her readers into the dual worlds of her novels, inviting them to explore with her the thorny issues that inform and shape her characters lives.

(Huntley 24)

Symbol, according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary

Terms, is anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it

—usually an idea conventionally associated with it. In literary usage, a

symbol is a specially evocative kind of image; that is, a word or phrase

referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some

further significance associated with it (251-52).

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Being an ethnic writer, Tan resorts to some culturally specific

symbols to facilitate conveying her theme. In Symbolic Ethnicity: The

Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America, Herbert J.Gans brings

up the discussion about symbolic ethnicity. According to Gans:

Symbolic ethnicity is characterized by a nostalgic allegiance to the culture of the immigrant generation, or that of the old country, a love for and a pride in a tradition that can be felt without having to be incorporated into everyday behavior (177).

In response to their nostalgic wish, the overseas Chinese have, for

instance, taken the lion dragon dance, which is traditionally associated

with the Chinese New Year, out of the Chinese tradition and given it

greater importance. The lion dragon dance is flamboyant and clear in

meaning to great numbers of Chinese Americans. The lion dragon dance

is not so widely practiced in China but has become an inevitable part of

various celebrations both in and outside Chinatowns in North America.

The dance has become a popular practice, because it lends itself to

demonstrating Chinese identity and to impressing the mainstream as well

as members of other ethnic groups. In comparison with the lion dragon

dance, equally importantly, there are many other things that can be used

as ethnic symbols, and these symbols may range from consumer goods,

religious figurines to food ways.

Applying Gans' notion of symbolic ethnicity to Tan's three selected

novels, it appears, at the first glance, that she employs many ethnic

symbols to ensure her theme of ethnic identity and conflicts in the

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immigrant families. For instance, Tan uses images of Chinese food

heavily in her novels which acts, some times, as ethnic symbols. As

Susan Kalčik says in her article, Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol

and the Performance of Identity, "Food is potently a symbol of ethnic

identity"(44). Kalčik goes on to add:

Food remains… a significant way of celebrating ethnicity and group identity. For old and new ethnic groups in America, foodways-the whole pattern of what is eaten, when, how, and what it means-are closely tied to individual and group ethnic identity (38).

Therefore, eating Chinese food together with other fellow Chinese

Americans or immigrants of Chinese descent is an identity marker. By

doing so, second generation Chinese Americans, who are not sure about

their ethnic identity feel that they do belong to the Chinese community.

Also, discovering the meaning of their Chinese names, particularly

for Jing-mei in The Joy Luck Club and Olivia in The Hundred Secret

Senses, is another symbolic device employed by Amy Tan. When they

mature, many second generation Chinese Americans are eager to

rediscover the meanings associated with their original Chinese names,

because a person's name is one of the most important identity signifiers,

telling other people who one is and where he/she is from. In the case of

Chinese names in particular, they are always imbued with various layers

of meanings and they are regarded as an integral and inevitable part of

Chinese identity. Through rediscovering the meanings of their original

Chinese names, second generation Chinese Americans symbolically

regain a meaningful Chinese identity.

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Returning to the Country of Ancestry is another symbolic device

employed by Tan in her three selected novel. Noticeably, Tan's three

novels ends by a trip to China and of course this is not a coincidence but

has also a symbolic significance. Unequivocally, these homeland trips

have a profound impact on second generation Chinese Americans. First

of all, when they travel to China, their feelings of Chinese-ness are

revived. Through returning to China, second generation Chinese

Americans discover many things that are not available in the

reminiscences of their immigrant parents and acquire a new

understanding of their ethnic identities. After travelling to their country

of ancestry, many of them become proud of their Chinese ethnicity.

The Joy Luck Club

As Huntley puts it, The Joy Luck Club is "dense with symbols and

allusions" through which Tan explores the "layers of the palimpsest that

is her text, her narrative of the immigrant experience in America, her

exploration of the bond between mother and daughter" (44). Also, Kim

Becnel describes the novel as "rife with symbolism"(91). In this novel,

Tan employs many significant symbols and, as stated by Gloria Shen,

"moves with swiftness and ease from one story to another, from one

symbol or image to another (5).

The club, which the novel carries its name, the joy luck club, with

its Mahjong table, is a significant symbol employed by Tan in the novel.

Suyuan Woo forms the club in China during the war. In America,

Suyuan again organizes a joy luck club among her fellow female Chinese

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immigrant friends who have daughters whom they are trying to raise in

the new and alien culture. Although established in America, the club, as

supported by Erin Fallon, "preserves its Chinese identity by enabling the

mother's to share familiar food, stories, and customs around a mahjong

table" (400). To put it another way, the club is, so to speak, a small

Chinese community within the American society; A gathering in which

the Chinese immigrant mother's ensure their adherence to their ethnic

identities by recalling past memories of China, eating Chinese food, and

playing the Chinese mahjong.

Through the way by which the American born Jing-mei views the

club, we can understand its symbolic significance. At the beginning,

When Jing-mei replaces her mother at the joy luck mahjong table and

tries to keep up with the incessant chatter of her aunties, speaking in

"their special language" (34), all she feels is the tremendous distance

between her and them. She regards the club as "a shameful Chinese

custom," like "the secret gathering of the Ku Klux Klan or the tom-tom

dances of TV Indians preparing for war" (28). She always feels out of

place in this Chinese environment among old Chinese women who wear

"funny Chinese dresses with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches

embroidered of silk sewn over their breasts"(28).

Later, after her mother's death, June reluctantly accepts her aunties'

invitation to take her mother's place at the Mahjong table. This

acceptance is her first step towards accepting her Chinese identity. By

identifying herself as part of this Chinese custom, she admits the Chinese

part in her. Despite her initial reluctance, she learns to honor both her

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mother and her cultural legacy. She becomes, in Fallon words, "a foil for

the other daughter's, who reject their Chinese heritage and, consequently,

become distanced from their mothers"(400).

Being almost the only gathering in which mothers and daughters

are found together, the club also acts as a bridge connecting the two

generations and the two cultures. In this club, we can see mothers,

daughters, grandchildren, Chinese, Americans, a wonderful fusion of

cultures and generations. It is, in Gloria Shen words, a "bridge uniting

both space and time"(6).

Also, Tan's use of Chinese food in her novel acts, sometimes, as

an ethnic symbol. As elucidated, ethnic symbols can enhance people’s

feeling of being ethnic, because they are "visible, clear in meaning to

large number of ethnics" (Gans 436). Food is probably the best ethnic

symbol, because food confers a kind of membership status on people.

Eating the same food declares that one is a member of a particular group.

Through eating together with other people of Chinese descent, second-

generation Chinese Americans feel that they definitely belong to the

Chinese community.

Food, in Susan Kalčik words, "is potently a symbol of ethnic

identity"(44). There are many instances in which Tan mentions Chinese

food in her novel to ensure ethnicity. For example, one of the most

unique rituals of the joy luck club gathering is cooking special Chinese

food. Although the club's purpose, as Huntley remarks, is to play mah-

jong and discuss the group's investments, "the activity at the centre of

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club meetings is eating, communal dining accompanied by storytelling

and good-natured arguing"(45).

Another illustrative example occurs at the Woo's crab dinner. To

celebrate the Chinese New Year, Suyuan prepares a crab dinner and

invites Lindo, her husband, Waverly, her brother Vincent, his girlfriend,

Waverly's daughter Shoshanna, Rich, and Jing-mei's old piano teacher,

Mr. Chong. While eating, Lindo challenges Waverly's Caucasian fiancé

to eat the crab butter, a delicacy to the Chinese: "why you are not eating

the best part?...you have to dig in here, get this out. The brain is most

tastiest, you try"(203). As expected, both rich and Waverly react with

disgust. Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong argues that this reaction of disgust is

exactly what Lindo intends to draw out in order to show "her displeasure

at the interracial union: she wants to emphasize the cultural chasm

between the two young people, imply that Rich is not sincerely interested

in her daughter (otherwise he would have learned to eat Chinese) (69).

When Lindo criticizes that Rich does not know how to eat Chinese food,

that is, crab, Waverly protests, "Crab isn’t Chinese"(203). Actually, crabs

are not Chinese, but the way they are cooked and served in this episode is

Chinese. What annoys Lindo is not Rich's ignorance of crabs, but his

ignorance of Chinese culture.

To the Chinese, names are not only phonetic or written symbols.

Instead, every Chinese name is imbued with rich and special meanings.

Upon arrival in the United States, Chinese immigrants often anglicise

their names hoping the change will help them assimilate into the

mainstream of American society. The most salient shortcoming of this

process of Anglicisation is that the original meanings of the Chinese

names are eradicated and misrepresented in the newly adopted English

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names. Regardless of whether the name change really assisted the

Chinese immigrants in integrating themselves into American society, it

surely perplexed many of them.

For instance, when she immigrates to America, Ying-ying changed

her name. Since there is no immigration category for "the Chinese wife of

a Caucasian citizen," she is declared as a "Displaced Person"(104). Then

her husband renames her "Betty St. Clair" in the immigration papers and

crosses her Chinese name "Gu Ying-ying" without seeming to realize he

is "effacing her Chinese identity in doing so"(Hamilton 130). By

changing her name and writing the wrong year of birth on her

immigration papers, Clifford St. Clair erases all signs of Ying-ying's

former identity. She has lost her name and identity and becomes a silent

and passive American wife.

Through rediscovering the meanings associated with their original

Chinese name, second generation Chinese Americans gain a meaningful

identity. As William Boelhower explains: "By discovering the self

implicit in the surname, one reproduces an ethnic seeing and understands

himself as …an ethnic subject"(qtd. in Huntley 48). For instance, Jing-

mei has never known that her Chinese name "Jing-Mei" has a meaning.

After arriving in Guangzhou, when Jing-Mei is aroused by her curiosity

to inquire about the names of her twin sisters so as to correctly address

them, she learns that every Chinese name has a special meaning and so

does her name:

"And what about my name," [Jing-Mei asks,] "what does 'Jing-mei' mean?" "Your name also special," [Jing-Mei's father] says…. "'Jing' like excellent jing. Not just good, it’s something pure, essential, the best

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quality. Jing is good leftover stuff when you take impurities out of something like gold, or rice, or salt. So what is left – just pure essence. And 'Mei,' this is common mei, as in mei mei, 'younger sister' "(280).

Discovering the meaning of her name is very important for Jing-

mei, because, only after learning the meaning associated with her Chinese

name, she understands the expectations that her father and her deceased

mother Suyuan had of her becoming the best, as becomes evident in the

word "Jing". Thus, through discovering the meaning of her Chinese

name, Jing-mei becomes a meaningful self and accomplishes a significant

step towards mending her incomplete Chinese identity. As Zenobia Mistri

remarks:

The trip to china becomes the way in which June Woo claims her name, and the other part of herself, Jing-mei Woo, that she has never understood or accepted (48).

Jing-mei's trip to her homeland, China, at the end of the novel is

also symbolic. By common consent, when second generation Chinese

Americans travel to China, their senses of Chinese-ness are invigorated.

In Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean

American Identities, Kibria says that the Chinese identity of second-

generation Chinese Americans sometimes "assumes…a dormant form,

waiting for an opportune moment to rise to the surface and be activated"

(49). For instance, in The Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo tells her daughter

Jing-Mei that "once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and

think Chinese…Someday you will see, …it is in your blood, waiting to

be let go" (267).

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At the end of the novel, Jing-mei and her father Canning Woo

travel to Mainland, China via the British colony Hong Kong. After a

brief stopover in Hong Kong, they embark on their long-awaited railway

journey to Guangzhou. Both of them are exhilarated. The minute that

their train crosses the Hong Kong border and enters the Chinese territory,

Jing-mei feels an exquisite tremor in her body:

I feel different,… I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And, I think, my mother was right. I am becoming Chinese (267).

Similarly, Jing Mei's father Canning, who is seventy-two years old

and who has not been back to China for thirty-odd years, becomes so

excited that his eyes are filled with tears of joy. Jing-mei says:

I don't know whether it's the prospect of seeing his aunt or if it's because he's back in China, but now he looks like he’s a young boy, so innocent and happy… For the first time I can ever remember, my father has tears in his eyes…And I can't help myself. I also have misty eyes (268).

Therefore, it becomes evident that, when second-generation

Chinese Americans travel to China, their dormant Chinese identity

becomes activated. They are transformed from feeling inferior about

their Chinese ethnicity to being proud of their Chinese ethnicity.

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Beside those so culturally specific symbols, Tan employs other

significant symbols, such as Suyuan Woo's jade pendant and Schumann

two pieces of music Pleading Child and Perfectly Contented, to reinforce

her theme. Suyuan gives the pendant to her daughter at a point when

Jing-mei is feeling terrible about herself saying: "See, I wore this on my

skin, so when you put it on your skin, then you know my meaning"(208).

Although Jing-mei accepted the pendant, she thought it was too big and

gaudy and did not understand its meaning. Later, after her mother's

death, Jing-mei begins to appreciate the pendant and understand what it

means. This symbolizes her acceptance of her mother's heritage and

understanding her love.

As already mentioned before, Jing-mei, after her

embarrassing failure in the music talent show when she is

a child, never played piano again. Years later, Suyuan offered

the family's piano to Jing-mei as a gift for her thirtieth birthday, and only

after Suyuan death did Jing-mei have the piano restored. When she sat

down to play, Jing-mei discovers that the song Pleading Child

which she has played very poorly in the talent show, and

Perfectly Contented another song printed on another side

of the page which she has paid no attention to in the past,

are two halves of the same song by Schumann. As Jing-

mei plays the two songs on the piano, she realizes that

the songs' notes come back to her quite easily: "'Pleading

Child' was shorter but slower; `Perfectly Contented' was

longer, but faster" (144).

This signifies that the mature Jing-mei realizes that

though she once thinks her childhood is sad like a

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"pleading child," it is only a short period of her life. It

symbolizes Jing-mei's relationship with her mother: "these

phrases may appear to be contradictory, but, in fact, they

are really two natural and complementary stages of life"

(Shen 14). She is perfectly contented as she appreciates

her mother's love and forgiveness. In other words, she

has evolved from a "Pleading Child" to a "Perfectly

Contented" woman who can understand the two cultures

that have shaped her, and realizes that just as these two

pieces of music are "two halves" of the same song, she is

also "two halves" of the same person, and "two halves" of

the same identity— the Chinese and the American. (Galen

299).

In short, these symbols represent the achievement of the novels’

goal for the daughters to finally accept and understand their own Chinese-

ness in a way that will lead to the formation of an ethnic identity.

The Kitchen God's Wife

The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) is Amy Tan's second bestselling

novel. It reached the New York Times bestsellers list within a month after

its publication by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1991 and remained there for

thirty-eight weeks. Later this book was included on similar bestsellers

lists in Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Germany, Norway, and

Spain. It won the Booklist Editors Choice Award and nomination for the

Bay Area Book Reviewers Citation. Often compared to works by

renowned authors Fyodor Dostoevsky, Boris Pasternak, and Leo Tolstoy,

the novel appealed to readers of different backgrounds.

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Like its predecessor, The Kitchen God's Wife garnered substantial

critical approbation, in some cases, from writers who found it more

appealing than they did The Joy Luck Club (Huntley 9). Rhoda Koenig

of New York magazine described it as "a novel even better than the

bouncy, touching stories of The Joy Luck Club" (83). While Sybil

Steinberg called it "a triumph, a solid indication of a mature talent for

magically involving storytelling, beguiling use of language and deeply

textured and nuanced character development(qtd. in Huntley 9). In A

companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction, David Seed

remarks that "although Tan's reputation is based mostly on The Joy Luck

Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, which has received significantly less

critical attention, is in many ways a stronger book"(526). Also, in A

Critical Guide To Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, Kathleen

Wheeler praises the novel as "the most amazing, colorful, adventurous

digression a narrator achieved since Tristram Shandy"(306). And finally,

Lisa Lowe describes the novel as a feminist text that "multiplies the sites

of cultural conflict, posting a number of struggles- familial and

extrafamilial- as well as resolutions"(qtd. in Huang 132).

Textually, The Kitchen God's Wife circles around Winnie, the

Chinese mother who survives the Second World War, is married to an

abusive sadist husband, has lost her three children in China, and leads a

new life in America with all her past secrets hidden; and Pearl, the

American-born daughter who is married to a Euro-American, and is,

emotionally alienated from her mother as she tries to avoid her mother's

participation in many aspects of her life. In this book, both the mother

and daughter have kept terrible secrets from each other - for the mother,

Winnie, it is her past during World War II in China and more

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importantly, the fact that Wen Fu is Pearl's real father; whereas for the

daughter, it is her illness of multiple sclerosis that she wants so

desperately to keep away from her elderly mother.

Again, in The Kitchen God's Wife Tan explores her theme of

ethnic identity and conflicts in the immigrant families by portraying the

relationship between the Chinese immigrant mother Winnie, and her

American born daughter Pearl. The novel examines how Pearl comes to

construct an identity through her interaction with her mother–

specifically, through hearing her mother's past story in China. In Who's

Who in Contemporary Women's Writing, Jane Eldridge Miller comments

on this point:

The Kitchen God's Wife….is also concerned with relations between generations and the importance of family stories in forming one's identity (316).

Also, E.D Huntley writes that in The Kitchen God's Wife Tan

complicates the relationship between Winnie and Pearl by "situating

them on opposite sides of a great cultural and linguistic divide". She also

remarks that Tan addresses in her new novel a number of other important

themes and issues, among them "cultural dislocations and identity

confusions"(75).

Just as the American born Jing-mei starts and ends The Joy Luck

Club, Pearl does the same in The Kitchen God's Wife. By doing this, Tan

enables us to understand the change that undergoes Pearl's identity during

the course of the novel. As Judith Caesar puts it in Patriarchy,

Imperialism, and Knowledge in The Kitchen God's Wife:

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The story that frames the story, that of Jiang Weili's daughter Pearl and her relationship with her mother, seems like yet another story about returning to one's roots to discover some less complicated identity (39).

Again also, it is the American-born character who feels confused

about her ethnic identity since her mother still, despite decades of living

in America, identifies herself as a Chinese. She lives in San Francisco

and co-owns a flower shop in Chinatown with her lifelong friend, Helen.

She has built a life for herself in America, but that life is deeply rooted in

her friends and family, who are also Chinese. She is displaced; after all,

she left China to escape her husband, not because she didn't love her

country. Her immigration was only to put an end to her suffering with an

abusive husband. She remembers bitterly:

When I came to this country, I told myself: I can think a new way. Now I can forget my tragedies, put all my secrets behind a door that will never be opened, never seen by American eyes. I was thinking my past was closed forever and all I had to remember was to call Formosa "China," to shrink all of China into one little island I had never seen before. I was thinking, Nobody can chase me here. I could hide mistakes, my regrets, all my sorrows. I could change my fate (71-2).

Deeply adherent to her Chinese-ness, Winnie resists becoming

Americanized and often mocks at Western ways of doing things.

Describing her uncle, she says that every year he took up a new hobby

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such as growing flowers. She remarks in chapter six, "He always called it

'hobby,' just like the English, no Chinese word for doing something only

to waste time, waste money"(115). In chapter twelve, she describes

putting on her coat and shoes to walk into town, three or four li away.

She explains to Pearl that a li is about a half-mile, adding, "And I had to

walk that distance. I wasn't like you, getting into a car to go two blocks to

the grocery store"(212). Winnie means only to express her pride in her

native land and to emphasize how difficult life was for her then,

especially compared to Pearl's life of convenience. In chapter thirteen,

she remarks:

We didn't complain too much. Chinese people know how to adapt to almost anything. It didn't matter what your background was, rich or poor. We always knew: Our situation could change any minute (225).

Many of Winnie's characteristics point to her Chinese heritage and

lifestyle. Her reliance on superstition and luck is a critical part of her

thinking. Despite marrying a Baptist minister, she adheres to the religion

of her past. Pearl recalls a childhood memory of seeing a ghost. She told

her mother, who immediately began searching for the ghost. Winnie's

father, on the other hand, explained that there are no such things as

ghosts, and that the only ghost is the Holy Ghost, who would never try to

scare children. Her superstitious Chinese thinking perplexes her daughter

who, according to her American culture, believes only in logic and

scientific thinking. Pearl remarks:

To this day it drives me crazy, listening to her various hypotheses, the way religion, medicine, and superstition all merge with

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her own beliefs. She puts no faith in other people's logic… She's like a Chinese version of Freud, or worse. Everything has a reason. Everything could have been prevented (29).

Not only Winnie's characteristics identify her as a Chinese

immigrant, but also, in her language and conduct, she exhibits many

characteristics of Eastern culture. She is, for example, subtle and often

talks around what she means to say, a method of communication that is

lost on her daughter. Other Chinese people of Winnie's generation,

however, understand exactly what is being said, even when someone is

speaking indirectly. Persuading her daughter to stay for Auntie Du's

funeral, Winnie tells Pearl that Auntie Du was always "proud" of her.

Winnie knows that what Auntie Du meant by this was that she loved

Pearl: "And then she reminded me that Grand Auntie was always very

proud of me—in our family 'proud' is as close as we get to saying

'love'"(17).

In contrast to Winnie, Pearl, as Judith Caesar puts it, "embodies the

American sensibility in all its directness and in all its limitations"(39).

While, for example, Winnie talks around topics, Pearl is a typical

American in that she believes in talking plainly about what needs to be

said. When Winnie expresses her wish that Helen had been more helpful

in caring for Auntie Du, Pearl, "with all the confidence of American pop

psychology"(39), simply suggests that she tells Helen how she feels:

"why don't you just tell Auntie Helen what's bothering you and stop

complaining?"(13) Caesar comments on this point:

Like well-meaning Americans in China, Pearl makes cultural gaffes in dealing with the older Chinese-American community and even with her mother because she doesn't

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seem to understand the differences between outer display and actual feeling or the realm of implied meanings that are so much a part of Chinese tradition (39).

Of course, Caesar argues, Pearl doesn't realize that her mother is

quietly boasting to Pearl about her dutifulness and implying that more

could be expected of Pearl as well. Thus, Pearl is shocked when her

mother is so profoundly offended that she will barely speak to her for a

month (39). Certainly, these cultural differences between Pearl and her

mother cause tension and add to Pearl's confusion about her ethnic

identity.

Like the daughters in The Joy Luck Club, Pearl is thoroughly

Americanized: she speaks perfect American English, even works as "A

speech and language clinician for children with moderate to sever

communicative disorders"(82), she is married to Phil Brandt, "not

Chinese"(81), and lives in San Jose. Her two daughters "have no

problems speaking English"(82). Yet, Pearl is unhappy in the American

life she has created for herself and feels that there is something missing.

She, in Huntley words, "seems to have all but repudiated her Chinese

heritage while embracing her American identity"(60).

Throughout the novel, Winnie remembers instances when Pearl

had been hesitant to learn about her Chinese past. For example, when she

was studying the Second World War in school and her mother tried to tell

her about World War II in China, Pearl had complained that what her

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mother was talking about was "Chinese History" not "American History".

Winnie remembers:

When you were little, you didn't even know there was a war in China! You thought World War Two started at a place in Hawaii with your same name, Pearl Harbor. I tried to tell you, but you were always correcting me. You said, "Oh, Mommy, that's Chinese history. This is American history." It's true, it's true. You told me that once (172).

Pearl's hesitation to know about her Chinese background is in fact

a result of her desire to fully assimilate in the mainstream and to get rid of

her Chinese heritage. To do so, she struggles with her Chinese mother as

a child, and avoids her as an adult. We know about Pearl's childhood

conflict with her Chinese mother just before Winnie decides to unfold her

past story to her. Entering Pearl's room reminds Winnie with the old days

of their conflicts, differences, and misunderstandings:

I went into Pearl's room. So many hurts and fights in this room. The Barbie doll I let her have, but no Ken. The perfume I wouldn't let her wear because it made her smell like cheap stuff. The curved dressing table with the round mirror and silver handles, the one I loved so much, but gave to my daughter instead. And when she saw it, she said she hated it! (81)

There is so much resulting distance between Pearl and her mother

that Winnie is even afraid to go though Pearl’s childhood things:

What if I opened this box and saw a stranger, what then? What if this daughter

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inside this box was nothing like the one I had imagined I had raised? (82-3)

The climax of their conflict comes at Jimmy Louis's funeral, and

results not out of the mother's desire to control Pearl or mold her

according to her own desires, but mainly out of misunderstanding due to

their cultural differences. At her father's death, Pearl is unable to weep

because her grief is too deep for tears. Winnie slaps her because

"traditional Chinese culture measures grief by how loud one cries at the

funeral"(Nelson 367). Winnie misunderstands Pearl's dry eye at her

father's funeral as a sign of carelessness and ingratitude, a thing that hurts

her so much because she is the only one who knows that Jimmy is not

Pearl's real father. In time, Pearl comes to believe that her mother loves

her brother more, and Winnie is convinced that her daughter thinks she is

a bad mother.

Although there is no clear or definite conflict between them as

adults, their relationship is not that of a mother and daughter. In other

words, they treat each other's like strangers. Their relationship, in Huntley

words, is "strained, uneasy, characterized by a rift that slowly is widening

in a process that neither woman seems able halt"(62). Winnie has

summed up her relationship with Pearl in this way:

That is how she is. That is how I am. Always careful to be polite, always trying not to bump into each other, just like strangers (81-2).

Also, as Pearl reflects on her relationship with her mother, she is

saddened to realize that though they are supposed to be close, they are in

fact emotionally estranged: "Although we have not seen each other since

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Christmas, almost a month ago, we do none of the casual hugs and kisses

Phil and I exchange when we see his parents and friends"(21). She

wonders at their estrangement:

Mostly I see my mother sitting one table away, and I feel as lonely as I imagine her to be. I think of the enormous distance that separates us and makes us unable to share the most important matters of our life. How did this happen? (34)

Aware of their alienation, Winnie attempts to shorten the distance

between them by accustoming herself to the American thinking and

culture. For example, as Winnie tries to explain to Pearl and Phil and her

granddaughters about the hierarchy of Chinese deities, she adopts an

Americanized explanation and describes the Kitchen God's position as "a

store manager, important, but still many, many bosses above him" (53).

Also, after she has told them about the story of the Kitchen God, Phil

reckons that the Kitchen God is like Santa Claus, but Winnie dismisses

his metaphor and says that he is "More like a spy - FBI agent, CIA,

Mafia, worse than IRS," using American terms to contextualize the

Chinese deity (55).

Despite her attempt to immerse herself in her daughter's world,

Pearl still sees Winnie through the gaze of Chinese-ness. She dismisses

her incomprehensible behavior as Chinese and attributes their

misunderstandings and difficulties in communication to their cultural

differences. She reckons spending time with her mother is like spending

the "whole time avoiding land mines" and is puzzled why she still gives

in to her family obligations, upon the request of her mother (16). That is

why Pearl keeps her illness secret from her mother. Dreading her

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mother's reaction, she has concealed for seven years the fact that she is

afflicted with multiple sclerosis. Huntley comments:

Her reticence is not born solely out of a desire to protect her mother from an unpleasant shock, but also from the fact that Pearl has deliberately excluded her mother from many arenas of her life. In fact, Pearl rarely visits her mother, whose bossy criticisms and pervasive superstitions have created an emotional and cultural gulf between the two women (60).

However, like the daughters in The Joy Luck Club, particularly

Waverly, Pearl knows the power of her mother's words and fears her

influence and her ability to shake her believes. When, for example,

Winnie learns that Pearl has got a new job in competition with two other

candidates, instead of congratulating her daughter, Winnie remarks:

"Two? Only two people wanted that job?"(15) This discouraging

comment makes Pearl worried whether she has missed a better

opportunity.

Because she is so thoroughly a contemporary American woman,

Pearl, in Huntley words, "is irked by her mother's demands that she

participate in family traditions that to her are simply burdensome"(75).

She always feels out of place in such gatherings, she tries to make all

possible excuses to avoid it but in vain, as her mother every time manages

to "catch her"(48). Pearl's feeling of estrangement in her Chinese

family's gatherings is for no reason but her sense that she doesn't belong

to those people; she is completely American and has nothing to do with

the Chinese customs or traditions. To phrase it alternately, she cannot

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accept the Chinese culture as part of her own. She talks about her feeling

of estrangement when she visits her mother's flower shop:

As I walk past the door, a yellow pull-shade rustles And suddenly a little girl appears, her hands press to the glass. She stares at me with a somber expression. I wave, but she does not wave back. She looks at me as if I don't belong here, which is how I feel (18).

Three family occasions in the novel show Pearl's confusion about

her ethnic identity: Bao-Bao's engagement party, Grand Auntie Du's

funeral, and Bao-Bao's wedding party. The first two occasions occur at

the beginning of the novel before Winnie's talking-story with her

daughter and exposes Pearl's ignorance, estrangement, and even shame,

of her ethnic part. While the later, the wedding party, takes place at the

end of the novel and this time shows signs of Pearl's familiarity,

understanding, and willingness to accept her Chinese ethnic identity.

What happens before these incidents is also significant in

portraying Pearl's confusion concerning her ethnic heritage. when

Winnie calls Pearl to invite her to attend Bao-Bao's engagement party and

Auntie Du's funeral in San Francisco, she tries to make all possible

excuses to escape her mother's invitation and attempts to find a way to

"get out of it", but in vain (15). Not only Pearl who doesn't want to go,

but also her American husband Phil feels upset and remarks: "sometimes

I regret that I ever married into a Chinese family"(14). He is often

exasperated by these filial duties and obligations. It used to be a cause for

arguments during the early days of their marriage. But soon, with the

illness of Pearl, he gave in to his wife's Chinese customs. Pearl

comments on this issue:

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Over the years that we've been married, we've learned to sidestep the subject of my family, my duty. It was once the biggest source of our arguments. When we were first married, Phil used to say that I was driven by blind devotion to fear and guilt (15).

Not only Pearl tries to escape her mother's invitation, but also she

suggests that her husband "call and makes the excuses" to avoid staying

at her mother's house (16), a thing that Winnie realizes with sadness:

Last week for example, she called me to say she and her family could not stay overnight at my house. Actually, she did not call me herself, her husband called. But I knew she told him to call. I knew she was listening on the other line (76).

During the engagement party, Pearl feels out of place and lonely

among her Chinese relatives. Also her husband and two children feel the

same. Cleo resents the jellyfish when Winnie tells her that when Pearl

was a little girl said it tasted "just like rubber bands!", and she only

accepts food from Helen as she describes it as "like McDonald

hamburgers"(33). Phil also tries to "make polite conversation" with

Pearl's cousin Frank, who is a "chain-smoking", a thing that Phil "hates

with a passion", Pearl herself smiles "woodenly" and pretend that Mary

and her husband are still "the best of friends", she says:

And suddenly everything…feels like a sham, and also sad and true. All these meaningless gestures, old misunderstanding,

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and painful secrets, why do we keep them up? I feel as if I were suffocating, and want to run away (34).

After the dinner at engagement party, Pearl returns to her mother's

house with her husband and two children. Once again, she tries to avoid

her mother in different ways: she hesitates to initiate a conversation with

her or ask about "Auntie Helen's brain tumor", she declines her mother's

offer of "tea, instant coffee, and orange juice", and "at last… escaped"

with her husband to their room" (37).

The gulf between Pearl's Chinese and American selves becomes

more evident at Grand Auntie Du's funeral. Again, Pearl feels out of

place. She knows nothing about the customs of the Chinese funerals; her

ignorance appears when Bao-Bao gives them a "small red envelope of

lucky money" and Phil asks her: "what are we supposed to do with

these?" She answers "how should I know? I've never been to a Buddhist

funeral or whatever this is"(39). When Frank gives her a lit stick of

incense, she "look(s) around, trying to figure out what to do", she says:

I feel silly, taking part in a ritual that makes no sense to me. It reminds me of that time I went with some friends to the Zen center. I was the only Asian- looking person there. And I was also the only one who kept turning around, wondering impatiently when the monk would come and the sermon would begin, not realizing until I'd been there for twenty minutes that all the others weren't quietly waiting, they were meditating (44).

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Her mock-comment on the Chinese customs here is not unlike

Jing-mei's one about the joy luck club gathering : "a shameful Chinese

custom," like "the secret gathering of the Ku Klux Klan or the tom-tom

dances of TV Indians preparing for war" (Joy 28). This shows how badly

second generation immigrants regard their parents' ethnic customs and

tradition. Their comments also indicate their resentment of such customs

which they are unable to identify with or understand.

After "the dreaded weekend"(16) ends and Pearl and her family

take off, they express their relief: "'whew!' Phil sighs. 'Home.' And I too

sigh with relief. It's been a difficult weekend, but we survived"(51).

When they returns to Winnie's house again because the children need the

bathroom, Pearl and her mother holds a conversation about Auntie Du's

special tea, they laugh and appear to be intimate , so when they are about

to leave, Pearl feels "actually sorry"(52). Of course this is because

talking with her mother breaks the ice between them; they need only to

talk with each other.

The last family gathering, Bao-Bao's wedding party, occurs at the

end of the novel and looks quite different from the previous ones. At

wedding party, we witness a closer bond between Pearl and Winnie. They

don't sit at the same table sharing loneliness as before. Now they

exchange laughter and knowing looks. That is because after learning

about her mother's past in China, Pearl begins to regard her mother with a

new eye. She begins to appreciate her mother, and this is her first step

towards accepting her ethnic identity. At the end, She realizes, in C.C

Barfoot's words, that "she is a daughter of China as well as a daughter of

Bay California"(259).

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Pearl's initial acceptance of her ethnic identity appears in many

instances at the end of the novel: she doesn't refuse her mother's offering

of "some Chinese medicine"(414) for her multiply sclerosis, she accepts

her mother's present, the statue of Lady Sorrowfree, with great affection,

and she even agrees to accompany her mother and Auntie Helen in their

trip to their homeland, China. By doing so, she finally begins to identify

with her Chinese ethnic identity:

I can taste it too. I can feel it. Only a little amount and it is enough to remember-all the things you thought you had forgotten but were never forgotten, all hopes that can still be found(410).

Linguistic Differences

As I have discussed earlier, Tan uses linguistic differences in her

novels to play out cultural differences as well as a marker of ethnic

identity. Again in The Kitchen God's Wife, Tan registers similar

linguistic differentiations between the Chinese immigrant mother Winnie,

and her American-born daughter Pearl. Because she holds on her

Chinese ethnic identity and isn't completely assimilated in the

mainstream, Winnie is unable to speak perfect American English. Her

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broken English marginalizes her state as a minority. She is aware that

people sometimes mistreat her because her English is not good:

The Italian man who owned the hardware store treated me mean, yelled at me just because I wanted money back for a light bulb already burnt out when I bought it. He pretended he could not understand me. My English wasn't good enough, so no money back….who was he to criticize me? His English wasn't so good either, Italian accent (254).

This situation is not unlike what Tan experienced with her Chinese

mother, Daisy Tan. In her article Mother Tongue, Tan remembers that

people "in department stores, at banks, and in restaurants" didn't take her

mother seriously because of her "limited English", they "did not give her

good service, pretend not to understand her, or even acted as if they did

not hear her"(274).

However, despite her awareness of the problems that her limited

English brought upon her, Winnie is proud of her Chinese language

which is a basic component of her ethnic identity. In other words, by

appreciating her native language, Winnie is in fact appreciates her own

Chinese identity. In chapter five, for example, she explains to her

daughter the meaning of a Chinese word in English insisting that it

sounds more beautiful in Chinese:

She always called me syin ke, a nickname, two words that mean "heart liver," the part of the body that looks like a tiny heart. In English, you call it gizzard, not very good-

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sounding. But in Chinese, syin ke sounds beautiful (93).

Often, the immigrant Chinese characters have difficulties even

translating Chinese into English. Sometimes, there is no translation for a

Chinese word at all. When Winnie tries to explain taonan to her

daughter, she couldn't find any American word to define it:

This word, taonan? Oh, there is no American word I can think that means the same thing. But in Chinese, we have lots of different words to describe all kinds of troubles (207).

Surely enough, Winnie's inability to master the mainstream

language, unlike her daughter who speaks perfect American English but

cannot read or write Chinese, affects Pearl's perception of her Chinese

mother. Winnie recalls her futile effort at pronouncing Pearl's job right

and calls it "a speech therapist for retarded children," although Pearl told

her never to say that:

We don't call them retarded or handicapped children any more. We say 'children with disabilities.' We put the children first, the disabilities second. And I don't do just speech therapy. I'm really what's called a speech and language clinician. And I work only with children who have moderate to severe communicative disorders. You should never call them retarded (82).

Fed up with her mother's inability to say it correctly, Pearl writes it

down: "A speech and language clinician for children with moderate to

severe communicative disorders", but in vain. Although Winnie

"practiced saying this many, many times", she "still can't say them"(82).

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Thus, unable, in Huntley words, "to twist her tongue around the alien

polysyllabic terminology, Winnie worries that her daughter will believe

her to be unintelligent or slow-witted"(83).

Simply put, the linguistic differences between the American born

Pearl and her Chinese immigrant mother Winnie exemplify cultural

differences between them and exaggerate the dilemma of ethnic identity.

Talk-story

I will call her, long, long-distance. Cost doesn't matter, I will say. I have to tell you something, can't wait any longer. And then I will start to tell her, not what happened, but why it happened, how it could not be any other way.

(The Kitchen God's Wife 85-6)

Talk-story takes place in The Kitchen God's Wife as Winnie recounts

her hidden terrible secrets to Pearl, prompted by the manipulation of Helen,

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Winnie's friend from China, who insists that lies have to be got rid of before

death:

That's what I was thinking," said Helen. "We should sweep all the lies out of our life…I want to correct everything before it's too late. No more secrets, no more lying (79).

Winnie's talk-story in The Kitchen God's Wife is both different

and, I see, more interesting and capturing than those stories stated in The

Joy Luck Club. It is different because unlike the mothers and daughters

in The Joy Luck Club who narrate their stories in separate monologues,

Winnie is talking to an actual audience as she tells Pearl her stories

directly. References to the dynamic interaction between the mother and

daughter are evident as the storytelling process is interrupted from time

to time, as Winnie stops telling her stories for moments and talks "about

the need to go into the kitchen to make more tea, about how she no

longer likes to eat celery, about the burned out light bulb" (Huntley 62).

Through this direct storytelling, Winnie and Pearl, in David Seed's

words, "forge the connection that has been previously missing in their

relationship"(526).

Being thoroughly Americanized, it is hard for Pearl to understand

her mother's circumstances, which are removed geographically,

culturally, and temporally. Therefore, Winnie needs to make some effort

to facilitate an easy understanding for the daughter's sake. She translates

terms and contextualizes the Chinese circumstances to assist Pearl's

comprehension. As she talks, Winnie also attempts to correct some

misconceptions of Pearl, whom she believes has been brainwashed by the

American media's stereotypes. Winnie also invites Pearl's opinions,

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critique, and verdict: "You don't believe me? Did Auntie Helen tell you

this story herself? " (137), "And now I will tell you when all my luck

changed, from bad to worse. You tell me if this was my fault" (236),

"Tell me. If you saw this happen to your own child, could you

forgive?"(267), "So I ask you: what do you see? What is still there? Why

did I want to live so much?"(312), "So I had my divorce. Can you blame

me for wanting it? Can you blame me for what happened after

that?"(392) This direct talk-story approach opens an important doorway

to their communication. As she talks, the stories are no longer personal

to Winnie only, but become part of Pearl as well.

Long and tragic, Winnie begins to recount her tormented youth

story. Before she reached the United States, she suffered too much in

China. At a young age, her mother left home, and she never knew very

much about her mother's mysterious disappearance: "now I no longer

know which story is the truth, what was the real reason why she

left"(109). To the six-year old Winnie's mind, her mother becomes a

riddle as she tries to "make one whole story" from the gossips, "funny

and bad stories, terrible secrets and romantic tales," about her mother who

never comes back (100).

After her mother's disappearance, Winnie was "sent away" and

raised carelessly by her aunts: "I had to act like a guest, never asking for

things, waiting instead for some one to remember what I needed" (111).

When the time comes, Winnie's aunts arrange a traditional marriage for

her, to a Chinese man named Wen Fu, who turns out to be a terrible

husband. After they are married, Winnie finds out that he is not the

romantic wonderful man he appeared to be during the beginning of their

courtship. From this point in her life, she knows only unhappiness and

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suffering. She loses many children along the way, and suffers both

physically and emotionally.

During the War, and as her husband was finishing his training at

"an American-style force school"(164), Winnie meets Helen, whose

name in China was Hulan, and they become friends. By telling her

daughter about this friendship, Winnie is revealing that Helen and

Winnie are not really in-laws as the family in America believes, but only

friends who have gone through much hardship together: "so you see,

Helen is not my sister-in-law. She is not your real auntie"(172).

At a party with American soldiers, Winnie met a Chinese

American, Jimmy Louie, who asked her to dance. Back home, to punish

her for this, Wen Fu threw her to the floor, forced her to write a divorce

papers (which she did willingly), then raped her. Though she tried to

escape the next day, Wen Fu found her and brought her back. When the

war finally ended, they lived with her debilitated father, and Wen Fu took

over the household, selling anything of value. By chance (or fate), Weili

met Jimmy Louie again, and he confessed he had loved her since they

met. Weili finally left her marriage and went to live with Jimmy for

several months. At that time her young son, Danru, lived with her then

Winnie sent Danru away for his protection, and he died in an epidemic.

Winnie was taken to court and charged with abandoning her family and

allowing Wen Fu's son to die. The judge sentenced her to two years in

prison. Though Wen Fu offered to take her back, she preferred jail.

After a year in prison, Auntie Du got her released, and Winnie arranged

to join Jimmy in the US. Before she left, Wen Fu raped her. Nine

months later, Pearl was born:

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I did not say anything about the rape…I never told anyone. And nine months later, maybe a little less, I had a baby. I had you (393-94).

In America, Winnie lived with her new husband Jimmy Louie, the

man whom Pearl had always been told was her father. He was a good

husband, a good father, and a minister in the Chinese Baptist Church, but

he had died when Pearl was a teenager.

As Winnie's narration unfolds, we see a different Winnie, not a

critical, demanding mother who is never appreciative as Pearl has

thought her to be; but one who loves her children and would like to hide

her past from her daughter so that the daughter would not see her weak

side and think of her as a bad mother:

I didn't tell you about my past and still you thought I was a bad mother. If I had told you- then it would be even worse!" (398)

Pearl knows that her mother is a more complicated individual than

she originally perceives - the one-dimensional mother whose "words and

actions" reflect only "the peculiarities of an elderly Chinese woman"

(Huntley 76). Winnie's confession of past stories has an enormous impact

on Pearl, who learns that she has always misinterpreted her mother's

words and actions all these years. For example, Pearl finally understands

why her mother slaps her face furiously when she shouts that the man in

the casket is not her father at Jimmy Louie's funeral; it is because she has

spoken the darkest secret in her mother's life aloud, that Jimmy is really

not her biological father, but Wen Fu, her mother's horrible first husband

in China, is. She understands that the lack of maternal advice and

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guidance in Winnie's life leads Winnie to become a protective and

interfering mother.

Inspired by her mother's courageous confessional talk-story, Pearl

then goes on sharing her secret of illness with her mother, because she

sees that as the right moment to tell her mother "and that's how I knew it

was the right moment to tell her"(401). Upon learning about Pearl's

illness, Winnie's shock bursts out in furious words and she begins to trace

the possible reasons that lead to Pearl's disease, complains about Pearl's

inability to tend the disease herself, and thinks of possible solutions and

theories to cure Pearl. Listening to her mother's non-stop complaints,

things that she hates the most and dismisses as superstitious beliefs in the

past, Pearl's attitude is changed as she realizes that her mother's wants to

give her hope:

I was going to protest, to tell her she was working herself up into frenzy for nothing. But all of a sudden I realized: I didn't want her to stop. I was relieved in a strange way. Or perhaps relief was not the feeling. Because the pain was still there. She was tearing in away- my protective shell, my anger, my deepest fears, my despair. She was putting all into her own heart, so that I could finally see what was left. Hope (402).

The unburdening of the news of Pearl's illness ties the mother and

daughter together, as Winnie resumes her role as a protective mother. She

looks for medicine to help with the disease, including a trip back to China

because that is where she thinks the illness comes from, while the

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daughter is relieved to learn that her mother is always the one she should

have counted on. As Foster puts it:

Pearl knows her mother's story and can respect her more, not less, for her endurance. She is then able to see a woman molded by her experiences and her secrets-a woman who has lived with two lives. With the tiptoeing around ended, the distance dissipates. By sharing their secrets, they help each other to achieve voice (109).

Only by listening to her mother does she develop a context for

understanding her ethnic identity. Hearing her mother's story makes her

real to Pearl, as opposed to some embarrassing Orientalized other for the

first time. She's had a childhood, a past, some lost loves and tragedies.

She is strong, someone of whom she should be proud of rather than

ashamed.

In hearing her mother's story, Pearl fills in the gaps in her self.

Without these stories, she is in a hyphenated space in which, forced to

choose between American and Chinese cultures, she had lost any sense of

her own Chinese-ness. As R.Baird Shuman points out in Great American

Writers: Twentieth Century, "this establishment of communication

between mother and daughter heals the elder and completes the

younger"(1512).

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Symbols

Once again, Tan uses specific cultural and ethnic symbols that

reinforce the novel's theme and function as significant narrative

strategies. The three symbolic devices (i.e. food, Chinese names, and the

trip to homeland) employed in The Joy Luck Club appear also in The

Kitchen God's Wife, though this time to a lesser degree, and also in a

quite different way. Actually, it is food that acts as a significant ethnic

symbol in this novel. At certain points in the novel Tan manages, through

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food imagery, to explore cultural differences and ethnicities among her

characters.

Just as Ben Xu suggests in his essay Memory And Ethnic Self that

"identity …almost certainly will be activated from memory"(4), Eleanor

Rose Ty adopts what Winnie says in The Kitchen God's Wife, "some

memories live only on your tongue or in your nose"(235), and discusses

in his book The Politics of Visible in Asian North American Narratives,

the role food plays in Tan's books to "create this racialized identity"(102).

He states that:

In North American culture, food, and particularly food prepared for certain special occasions and holidays, is often used to differentiate, sustain, and celebrate ethnicities and cultures, especially for displaced and dislocated immigrants (102).

Following this rationale, the three family celebrations that takes

place in the novel include what Ty calls "food prepared for certain

special occasions", and Tan uses these meals as "symbolic…

ethnographic indicators"(102). These meals become, in Ty's words,

"markers or visible signs that signal the ethnized lives of the

characters"(102). On the dining table, two cultures and three generations

meet and interact. The table manifests relationships between people. Do

they share the same food? Are they against each other's food? What

happens when the Americans and the Chinese eat at the same table? In

The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet, and Culture, Stephen Mennell and

his collaborators argue that "the table can demolish barriers between

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people" on condition that they "tasted each other’s food with approval"

(qtd. in Hsiao 217).

The engagement party is a notable example. At dinner, family

members and friends of all ages gather around tables loaded with

traditional celebratory dishes, and children climb onto the labs of their

elders to demand assistance with chopsticks. When Winnie feeds her

American granddaughter a Chinese food, "jellyfish", and tells her that

Pearl used to compare it to "rubber bands", Cleo reacts by shrieking and

wailing, "The half eaten jellyfish dribbling out of her pouting lips"(33).

(This situation is not unlike Waverly&Rich's reaction of disgust in The

Joy Luck Club when Lindo Jong tries to show them how to eat Chinese

crab). The child calms down only when Auntie Helen feeds her "some

fragrant beef…tastes like McDonald hamburgers"(33). Winnie is hurt by

Cleo's indignation and horror, which is a rejection of things Chinese. The

refusal of the delicacy here becomes, in Ty's words, "a way of

establishing an Americanized, perhaps 'civilized' as opposed to barbaric,

identity". Ty goes on to add that:

Food is used as a demarcation of ethnic alliances, as a way of signaling boundaries of the self and other. The consequence, however, is that the figure associated with Chinese culture is categorized as the other that must be abjected, rendered strange, or ridiculed (112).

In this way, Tan uses food in her novel as a symbolic device to

show cultural differences and ethnicities among her immigrant

characters. The Chinese immigrant Winnie is proud of the Chinese food

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which is part of her Chinese identity, while her American granddaughter

prefers McDonald food which is also part of her American identity.

As discussed before, upon arrival in the United States, as a gesture

of determination to integrate into American society, many Chinese

immigrants anglicised their names or simply adopted more American

names, hoping the change would help them enter the mainstream of

American society, but this time in The Kitchen God's Wife when Winnie

immigrates to America, she has already an Americanized name. Winnie's

Chinese name is Weili, but when she meets Jimmy Louie at the American

dance in China he assigns her the American name Winnie: "and I became

Winnie, which Jimmy Louie said was a lively and lucky-sounding

name"(305). Adopting an American name symbolizes a new beginning

and new identity for Winnie, Huntley comments:

When she embraces the name "Winnie," she relinquishes her identity as a woman in Confucian China and steps into a new role as an immigrant woman in America. Winnie is immune to the cultural restrictions that bind Weili, but with that new name and its implied new role come unfamiliar challenges and barriers (77).

In America, Winnie decides to forget her past in China, Weili's

life. By doing so, she lives with a missing part in her self; that is her past

life in China as Weili, a life that she is unwilling to remember or identify

with. Only when she recounts her story to Pearl aloud, she revisits her

past and reassesses the significance of certain crucial events in her life,

and thus finally learns to accept her past as Weili and integrate that to her

present American life as Winnie.

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Once again, Tan concludes her novel with a trip to the land of

ancestry. This time, it is the Chinese Winnie and Helen who are planning

to visit China. They decide to take Pearl with them in their trip and she

accepts. Although at the beginning of the novel she regards her mother's

accompany as a burden, now she is ready to travel with her for a "long

distance"(76). Her willingness to go to China symbolizes Pearl's

acceptance of her Chinese ethnic identity.

In addition, Tan uses other significant symbols driven form popular

Chinese folktales such as the myth of the kitchen god. Undoubtedly, the

legend of the Kitchen God and his nameless wife are the primary symbols

of the book. The title stems from a Chinese myth about the Kitchen

God; it is a Chinese well known story about an ungrateful husband

named Zhang who leaves his faithful wife and pursues a beautiful but

wanton woman. After his material possessions dwindle and he is forced

to beg, his wife has pity on him and serves him his favorite dish. Once

the man realizes who has saved him, he feels such shame and remorse

that he throws himself into the kitchen fire. He burns to death and his

ashes float up the chimney to heaven. In heaven, the Jade Emperor

decides that Zhang, who has shown the capacity for shame, should be

rewarded with deification. Thus, Zhang becomes the Kitchen God,

responsible for judging the behavior of mortals each year. During each

New Year celebration period, he reports the names of those who should

be rewarded with good luck, as well as the names of those who deserve

bad luck as punishment for having behaved irresponsibly or badly.

Therefore, families must bribe him with sweets and liquor at New Year's.

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This folktale provides Amy Tan with the basic narrative outline

for her novel by introducing the figure of the abused wife. The Kitchen

God's Wife is a retelling of the Kitchen God's story, from a contemporary

feminist point of view. In the traditional version of the tale, the wife

disappears from the narrative after her husband becomes a god; but in

Tan's version, Weili, the wife who endures her husband's abuse and

philandering, is rewarded for her forbearance with another chance to

experience happiness, and she becomes Winnie, the survivor, the beloved

wife of a good man, the mother of an accomplished daughter, and the

grandmother of two American children (Huntley 65).

The story of the kitchen god symbolizes a very important part of

Pearl's ethnic heritage, but this time Winnie doesn't want her daughter to

embrace it. It symbolizes the passive role of the Chinese woman. The

Kitchen God's wife, like all women in a patriarchal society, is expected to

remain faithful and subservient to her husband, despite his infidelity. She

obediently accepts her misfortune, and she does not take it upon herself to

become empowered or challenge her husband's authority, even when he is

reduced to begging in the streets. When he is rewarded with god-hood,

she does not complain or ask for vengeance. Her identity remains

connected to her husband, she is known as the Kitchen God's wife. This

ideology is present not only in Chinese cultural attitudes but in American

stereotypes of Asian women as well. Asian women are usually associated

with passivity and quiet acceptance of their circumstances. Winnie

doesn't want her daughter to depend upon these images to define what a

woman's characteristics should be. Auntie Du had willed to Pearl the altar

to the Kitchen God, but Winnie promises to find a new God to fill it. She

hates the story, saying, "his wife was the good one, not him" (55).

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In the last chapter of the book, Winnie shops for a replacement god

to live in the altar, one who no one has heard of before. She buys a

goddess statue, a manufacturing mistake with no name on its pedestal.

Winnie names it Lady Sorrowfree writing her new name in gold on the

pedestal, saying: "no one would call her Mrs. Kitchen God" (414).

Winnie tells Pearl:

When you are afraid, you can talk to her. She will listen. She will wash away everything sad with her tears…. See her name: Lady Sorrowfree, happiness winning over bitterness, no regrets in this world (414-15).

Winnie sees a problem with the original Kitchen God myth; she

clearly sees a harmful patriarchal influence in the very customs and

traditions of Chinese culture. Finding fault in this folktale and looking

toward positive female figure enables Winnie and Pearl to construct their

own identity as individuals and as Chinese-American women.

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