Dwellers In The ’crack’-A Study Of Language Hybridity In The Joy Luck Club

Recently, The Joy Luck Club, Chinese-American writer Amy Tan’s well-acclaimed novella, has become a sweet pastry of postcolonialism. Some critics employ Homi Bhabha’s theory to explore the cultural hybridity in The Joy Luck Club. Although it is obvious that hybrid languages, like pinyin, Romanized pinyin, and English sentences with Chinese structure, are permeated between lines of the novella, the study of language hybridity and its significance are seldom touched upon by contemporary scholars.Therefore, borrowing Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, mimicry and Third Space, this thesis explores the purpose of the author’s employment of such language device and finds out that language hybridity in The Joy Luck Club is meant to open up a new space, a space of articulation for those who are caught in the in-between.Amy Tan, the Joy Luck Club mothers and daughters are all’Others’in both Chinese and American’s eyes. They are propelled tooose between cultures but whichever they choose would not please Chinese and Americans simultaneously. With no alternative, they are forced to make a choice between Sinicism and Yankeeism.1Hybrid languages, like the flush of dawn, illuminate dwellers in the’crack’. Through the hybrid language, the ice of cultural conflict is broken into pieces. The authority of pure English is destroyed through cultural intervention and language infiltration. During the process of language hybridity, a space of articulation emerges in the interstitial spaces between Chinese and English. With the establishment of this space of articulation, dwellers in the’crack’would not bother to choose between the East and West and "have negotiated aspects of Chinese and American culture to create their own hybridized cultural traditions"2.