Cultural Clash in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Abstract

makes an attempt to explore the idea of cultural clash in The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Amy Tan by applying the theory of diaspora. It intensely dramatizes the interrogational clash due to cultural differences. At the heart of this novel is the projection of how the first generation immigrants in the United States of America are haunted by the native cultural and tradition. By showing first generation Chinese immigrants in the United States of America clashed with their second generation children entirely upbrought in American lifestyle, Tan attempts to unravel the fact that all the time hullabaloo of multicultural American society does not give inner relief to the first generation diasporic people, though it offers modern amenities and aspirations for them.

By showing her all characters undergoing trial, trouble and tribulation in new location, Tan is critiquing the false consciousness of the happy and blissful life of diasporic subjects in American or western metropolis. No matter how attractive and comfortable life is in American metropolis, the feeling of native culture and home always haunt the first generation diasporic subjects like all mothers in the novel. Search for lost culture and identity always and all ways come to the psyche of first generation diasporic subjects, if not to the psyche of successive generations.