The Joy Luck Club And Everything I Never Told You:A Study Of The Daughter Images In The Chinese-American Novels

Chinese-American literature has received scholars'considerable attention,especially in the recent decades.As representative writers in the late 20^thcentury and early 21^thh century,Amy Tan?1954-?and Celeste Ng?1982-?have both been highly commended and awarded since the publication of their first novels-The Joy Luck Club and Everything I Never Told You.The Joy Luck Club was published in 1989,depicting the generation gaps and conflicts,cultural barriers and collisions between four pairs of Chinese-style mothers and American-style daughters,as well as the process of how the daughters seek and reshape their own identity in the white-dominated society.Everything I Never Told You was published in 2014,telling a story how the daughter,Lydia,finally gets self-redeemed under the expectation and pressure of an cross-ethnic family--Chinese father and white mother.Firstly,the images of the five second-generation Chinese daughters in the two novels are analyzed and classified into conformists,rebels and a home watcher respectively.Through contrasting them with the white ones in the same period,it is found that the Chinese-American females suffer a lot from gender and racial discrimination.Trauma theory is applied to analyze mothers'personal experiences in order to decipher the failure of educational methods of Chinese and American mothers for their daughters:the former implement the traditional Chinese values,while the latter places her own dream on the daughter,which imposes over-loaded pressure.Under this circumstance,daughters repeat the trauma from mothers,get perplexed and lost in the love and pressure of parents.With the differences of cultural background and growth environment being described,the two novels criticize the oppression of women by patriarchal society and praise the awakening of women's consciousness.Next,the theory of ethnic identity,combined with the second and third waves of Feminism,is taken to analyze the identity dilemma of daughters,who undertake identity hybridization through achieving equality and self-expression,and finally get their personal identity redeemed.