#Jing mei woo character traits full#

The first Chinese element Tan employs in The Joy Luck Club is mahjong. The most striking evidence is the Chinese elements. So Tan focuses on practices that allow the four daughters to reconcile with their mothers to recognize the importance of preserving and perpetuating their Chinese identities. Lost in double ethnic identities, they fail to move forward in their relationships and careers by abandoning the Chinese culture deeply infused into their blood. They even try to resist the import of the “other culture”, which causes a gap between both sides. In The Joy Luck Club, the four American-born daughters Jing-mei, Waverly, Rose and Lena are unable to understand the purpose of mothers’ repeatedly narrative misery in the past, the cultural implications behind mothers’ words and the Chinese elements like mahjong, the Five Elements, Yin-yang, fengshui and so on. Now, it was disappearing in a sense it had happened, its time was over.” The Orient is defined as “other” and stereotyped as a negative image, a kind of unenlightened and decayed civilization. Said says in Orientalism: “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. The publishment of Orientalism by Said in 1978 reinvigorated the antiquated Orientalism and made impact on modern humane scopes. As American-born daughters with a sense of superiority are shaped by the dominant American culture, there is an insurmountable asymmetry in the understanding of mutual native cultures between mothers and daughters, which represents the tough identity antagonism between the East and the West since the Middle Ages. As the second-generation of Chinese-Americans, Tan, as well as the four daughters in the book, faces the task of questing for identities in the midst of great personal loss and incompatible cultural context surrounding them.

#Jing mei woo character traits full#

Tan represents the discovery process as obscure and full with contrariety between Chinese-born mothers and American-born daughters. Rooted in long history and profound cultural connotation, the description of these elements is deeply endowed with deep feelings of the writer. An important thematic concern in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is Chinese elements. The conflicts between the four Chinese women and their American daughters run through the text, bringing up deep cultural differences between the West and the East. They set up a gathering party for playing mahjong named Joy Luck Club. The novel The Joy Luck Club tells the story of four Chinese women who suffered so many hardships in old China, and then immigrated to San Francisco in the 1850s. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to the development of cognitive linguistics. The conceptual blended networks prompted by dialogues among protagonists and narrative setting throughout the text can better demonstrate the metaphorical meanings through cross-space mapping with its uses and functions in order to explore the writer’s writing intention. Additionally, built upon a cognitive linguistic approach, the paper suggests the complementarity of the cognitive linguistic and literary approaches.

It serves as an effective tool to manifest the complex unity of the text’s meaning in the conceptual blend networks.

Developed by Fauconnier and others, the theory combines individual chunks of meaning together to produce new meanings. This article addresses Chinese elements in The Joy Luck Club from the perspective of a cognitive model known as Conceptual Blending Theory. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, the Chinese American female writer, is rich in Chinese elements, such as Mahjong, the Five Elements and Yin-yang.