Chinese American Female Identity Seeking In The Cultural Conflict

The Joy Luck Club is adapted from the well-known novel of Amy Tan, which involves four families, seven narrators, as well as sixteen stories and describes the life experiences and psychological development of both Chinese mothers and their American daughters.As we know, American society is still White Supremacy, whereas Chinese diasporas in the U.S., in particular the female Chinese Americans, are marginalized in various aspects of the Eurocentric patriarchy society. They suffer from the gender, social, as well as cultur-al discriminations. As a prolific and distinguished female Chinese American writer. Amy Tan's works address the identity crisis of the female Chinese Americans between the two cultures, and the identity anxiety of the second generation of the female Chinese Ameri-cans.The thesis is divided into six interrelated chapters. The first two chapters offer a brief account of the research background of the thesis and the film. Chapter three will introduce the theoretical rationale involved in the thesis—the identity, especially the identity seeking struggles of the Chinese diaspora. In chapter four and five, this thesis takes the moth-er-daughter relationship as the main thread, dwells on how female Chinese Americans struggle to live in "between worlds", break the obstacles of identity seeking and establish a new cultural identity of their own by negotiating the contradiction between the East and West, between male and female cultures, and between the Chinese culture and American culture, and how the identity is formed in the storytelling, silence-breaking as well as the reunion of the different generations of Chinese American women by breaking the ethno-centrism, prejudice and patriarchy in the U.S. and China. Meanwhile, contemporary cul-tural pluralism and globalization offer an opportunity for greater density of cross-cultural interchange. Therefore, the focus of identity construction would be relocated from diffe-rentiation to meeting point, and the reconciliation between apparently different even con-tradictory cultures and beliefs will be reached in the conclusion part.