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Chinese and Chinese-American Responses to Amy Tan

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Chinese and Chinese-American Responses to Amy Tan provided by UC Research Repository View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk CORE brought to you by “Airing Dirty Laundry”: Chinese and Chinese-American responses to Amy Tan A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in American Studies in the University of Canterbury by Yanyan Zhang University of Canterbury 2011 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments.................................................................................................... 3 Abstract.................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1 Introduction..............................................................................................5 1.1. Search for Reconciliation...................................................................................5 1.2. “Airing Dirty Laundry”..................................................................................... 6 1.2.1. The Debate about the “Real” and the “Fake” in the United States.................. 6 1.2.2. Response to Amy Tan in China.................................................................... 17 1.3. The Structure of This Thesis............................................................................21 Chapter 2 Search for Reconciliation through Translation: Cooking a Bowl of Her Soup............................................................................................................ 24 2.1. The Meaning of Her Soup............................................................................... 24 2.2. Her and Translation......................................................................................... 29 2.3. Three Types of Translation..............................................................................33 2.3.1. The Intralingual Translation..........................................................................34 2.3.2. Interlingual Translation.................................................................................36 2.3.2.1. The Case of “Sinking Fish”........................................................................36 2.3.2.2. The Power of Translation of Written Text................................................. 39 2.3.2.3. Her Language and the Subsequent “Airing Dirty Laundry” Problems.......42 2.3.3. Intersemiotic Translation.............................................................................. 45 2.4. Conclusion.......................................................................................................52 Chapter 3 “Airing the Kitchen God’s Dirty Laundry”............................................ 54 3.1. Introduction..................................................................................................... 54 3.2. Stereotypes and Counter-Images of Chinese Men........................................... 64 3.2.1. Stereotyping Chinese Men............................................................................64 3.2.2. Counter-Images............................................................................................ 69 3.3. The Other Side of Chinese Women................................................................. 73 3.3.1. A Brief Introduction to Traditional Chinese Family Values..........................74 3.3.2. The Different Side of Chinese Women......................................................... 78 3.4. The Case of Kitchen God’s Myth: Gendered Inheritance and Rewriting of Chinese Folklores in Tan’s works...........................................................................80 3.5. Conclusion.......................................................................................................85 Chapter 4 Portrait of Chinese Mothers....................................................................87 4.1. Introduction..................................................................................................... 87 4.2. The Causes of the Conflicts............................................................................. 88 4.2.1. The Rejected Mother.................................................................................... 88 4.2.2. The Alienated Chinese Maternal Figures......................................................94 4.3. From Conflicts to Reconciliation................................................................... 102 4.3.1. The Daughters’ Linguistic Approach to the Mothers.................................. 103 4.3.2. Communicate through the Power of Silence............................................... 107 4.3.3. Seeing the Mothers as Narrative Subject.....................................................114 4.4. Conclusion.....................................................................................................116 Chapter 5 Conclusion........................................................................................... 119 Bibliography.........................................................................................................124 3 Acknowledgments I wish to express my appreciation to my chief supervisor, Assoc. Professor Maureen Montgomery, for her constant and patient guidance and assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. I also want to thank my mother and my aunt, who are always prepared to motivate and inspire me with their knowledge and understanding of being a Chinese woman. 4 Abstract Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), is accused of being a “fake” Chinese American writer by radical Chinese American critics such as Frank Chin. I consider Tan’s fictional writing of the experience of Chinese immigrant mothers and their American born daughters to be an experiment in cross-cultural communication. Such communication may be highly personal and subjective to Tan, who claims to write so that her mother can understand her feelings and to remember what she has learned from her Chinese side. I also believe her writings create an opportunity for bi- (or cross-) cultural communication and it matches the concept of harmony in Chinese traditional philosophy. In Chinese scholar Jianjun Zou’s opinion, Tan’s works represent the notion of reconciliation, and that all of these works shall be viewed as a whole is the inspiration of this thesis. Reconciliation in terms of Tan’s works has three parts, which are: (1) the reconciliation between languages; (2) the reconciliation between genders; (3) the reconciliation among generations. The existence of reconciliation proves that Tan’s writing about the Chinese community is multi-dimensional. From my point of view, she should not be simply defined as a stereotype writer whose works can only reinforce the prejudices against the Chinese community and Chinese men. In my opinion, for Chinese American criticism, violation of the women’s right to tell of the oppression from the Chinese traditional family values should not be the solution to the prejudices of the white dominant culture. For Chinese critics in Chinese speaking regions, especially in China, I suggest that we should have a humble attitude towards the Chinese American literature because the “real” and the “fake” are difficult to define, even in the motherland of Chinese culture. 5 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1. Searching for Reconciliation Born in 1952, Oakland of California, Chinese American female writer Amy Tan/TAN EN MEI has to date authored five published novels: The Joy Luck Club (1989); The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991); The Hundred Secret Senses (1995); The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005); two children’s books and other non-fictional works, such as The Opposite of Fate (2004), a collection of her essays. Among all of Tan’s works, The Joy Luck Club, as her first published novel, achieved the most outstanding success and popularity. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months and translated into many languages. Several literary awards and nominations have been granted to Tan for her work on The Joy Luck Club, which was also made into a motion picture in 1993. When I was struggling to find a theme for the entire project, it was Chinese scholar Jianjun Zou’s book, Positive and Negative Dimensions of “Harmony”: On the Ethical Thoughts in Amy Tan’s Novels that gave me the most prominent inspiration on the issue of reconciliation. Zou’s work, also known as the first published book in the Chinese language that focuses on Tan’s five published fictional works, is based on one of the traditional Chinese philosophical notions, “和” (harmony and reconciliation). Inspired by Zou, I view the main theme in Tan’s mother-daughter narratives as searching for reconciliation between the Chinese mothers and the American-born daughters. Tan has claimed several times that her novels are dedicated to her mother; 6 however, in my opinion, there are actually three forms of reconciliation within Tan’s works, of which the mother-daughter reconciliation is just one. These three types of reconciliation are: (1) the reconciliation between languages; (2) the reconciliation between genders; (3) the reconciliation among generations. Their existence proves that Tan’s writing about the Chinese community is multi-dimensional. From my point of view, she should not be simply defined as a stereotype writer who can only reinforce the prejudices against the Chinese community and Chinese men. 1.2. “Airing Dirty Laundry” The
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