Culture clash

1.1.Problems within the Jong family /> Within family Jong, the atmosphere is not always relaxed, but there are some rather heavy conflicts between mother and daughter. These problems do not only arise from the normal generation gap that exists in most families, but they are even more intensified by the different background they grew up in and the different education they received.
Because of the two different perspectives that Amy Tan offers the reader, we are probably the ones who can best understand both mother and daughter, and are able to see through their misunderstandings better than the characters themselves ever could. In the following, I will show some examples of the distorted mother-daughter relationship, and try to explain why Lindo and Waverly always tend to argue.
Looking at the conflict from the daughter's point of view, one understands that it is not easy for her to fulfil all the high expectations Lindo has. She never seems to be satisfied with Waverly, even when her daughter wins a chess tournament: "Next time win more, lose less."(p.88)5
Waverly would like to be praised, but her mother would never do this in public because she is proud of her "Chinese humility"(p.87)5. This often stands in contrast to Waverly's wants and needs, in one case those of an eight-year-old child who would love to play with the chess set given as a Christmas gift from an old lady (p.83)5, which is absolutely natural. Waverly certainly thinks that she cannot do anything on her own without being watched and critically judged by her mother. When she plays chess and the press arrives, she has to take on the poses Lindo showed her (p.90)5 and when she is older and eats at a restaurant with her mother, she still gets embarrassed because of the steady complaints her mother always pronounces.
Waverly aims to live her own life despite Lindo who seems to control everything. During the first time of Waverly's relationship to Rich, Waverly criticises her mother's behaviour: "When I was first married, she used to drop by unannounced, until one day I suggested she should call ahead of time"(p.162)5. This leads to the situation that Lindo never comes to her daughter's flat unless she receives an invitation, which naturally minimalists the contact between mother and daughter and does not help them to understand each other better.
This same behaviour of both mother and daughter can already be seen in the beginning of the book, for example when Waverly criticises that Lindo always diminishes the worth of things Waverly has done and that she tries "to take all the credit"(p.164)5. Here, Waverly feels left over and expects a good word from her mother who does not seem to care for her daughter's feelings. This emotion builds up until Waverly shouts at her mother who is very hurt and stops talking altogether with her daughter. Waverly remembers: "It was as if she had erected an invisible wall"(p.167)6 and she cannot stand this situation because - as she mentions, "My mother knows how to hit a nerve."(p.164)6.
From Waverly's point of view, Lindo uses her enormous power to destroy all her daughter's hopes or achievements, as she also destroys Waverly's first marriage. Neither does Lindo appreciate her daughter's boyfriends, nor their presents: "This is not so good.[...]It is just leftover strips."(p.163)6. Waverly would like to fight against this, but - as she tells a friend - she "can't stand up to [her] own mother"(p.167)6. Although she wants to make Lindo "shut up"(p.168)6, she does not dare do this because she has learnt Chinese politeness from her parents.
From Lindo's perspective, however, everything looks different. She has difficulties dealing with her daughter who does not entirely follow her Chinese ways, but who wants to integrate in American society without being steadily regarded as a second-generation Asian immigrant. This does not imply that Lindo did not adapt herself to the new culture (she talks about her two faces, for example, and she gave her children English names), but it is clear that she will never be all-American no matter how hard she tries. It must be difficult for her to see that she has not succeeded in giving her children "the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character"(p.252)6.
Lindo also fears that she loses her daughter one day, which is why she named Waverly after the street they live in. As she mentions, "I wanted you to think, This is where I belong. But I also knew if I named you after this street, soon you would grow up, leave this place, and take a piece of me with you."(p.265)6. This might be a fear existing in most mothers, but I think that Lindo tends to exaggerate it because of her roots and her early loss of mother. When she worries that her grand-child will "forget that she had a grandmother"(p.41)6, this fear gets obvious again and it is revealed that she considers Americans as people who do not always say what they really mean and whose family bonds are not very strong.
These are mostly conflicts arising from the generation gap between mother and daughter, but Amy Tan offers the reader also an insight into the differences between American and Chinese values. This gets most obvious when Lindo looks at her daughter in the hairdresser's mirror and realises that Waverly's nose is not straight but slightly crooked. She takes this for a bad sign, because her grand-mother always measured a person's fortune by looking at their face. American-born Waverly, on the other hand, likes her nose because of the "devious" look it gives her, which the mother cannot understand either.
Another problem between the two is that Waverly does not value promises as much as Lindo does who almost sacrificed all her life not to break the promise made to her mother, which was very natural in China at this time. So she says, "to you promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, if she has a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favourite movie on TV, she no longer has a promise."(p.41)7.
Despite all these conflicts - I could only name a few here - Waverly and Lindo get together in the end and although they will always fight a little bit, they have finally gained mutual understanding so that both can avoid these arguments as much as possible in the future. Because the misunderstandings are finally solved, they will never feel something as strong as hatred or jealousy again and they have succeeded in bridging the gap existing between them.



1.2.Problems in immigrant families in general
Children of immigrants often encounter serious problems in their family life, of which I have already described various while naming the troubles within family Jong in The Joy Luck Club. There are some more conflicts, however, that I would like to mention, first of all the problem of language that I consider as particularly important.
In immigrant families, parents do not always teach their children their native language, which brings along the danger of misunderstanding. The parents cannot master English perfectly and so they cannot express themselves in a proper way, whereas the children do not know their parents' language, let alone the writing (esp. in Chinese or Japanese families), which again leads to a bigger gap between the two sides.
This happens because an identification with the parents' culture must fail, if the children do not read literature in their parents' language, or are not able to speak it themselves. So the second generation cannot appreciate the traditional values their parents still possess and conflicts between them are unavoidable. In The Joy Luck Club, this is presented to the reader in a very direct way, when Lindo talks about Chinese places and Waverly cannot even differentiate between the pronunciation of Taiwan and Taiyuan. For the mother, these two things are so opposing that she almost feels personally insulted by her daughter's ignorance.
Another problem could be that immigrants tend to be over-protectors towards their children, as seen in The Joy Luck Club as well. They often experienced tragedies and as a consequence, they do not want their progeny to have to bear similar circumstances. Besides, most parents had to leave everything behind in their home country, so a new experience of terrible loss would be unendurable to them, even more than to other parents.
This, however, makes these parents hard to satisfy, for they expect their children to achieve very high goals because of the good circumstances they were born in. It is certainly clear to everyone that nearly no child is able to fulfil all these expectations. Amy Tan herself experienced something similar to this, she remembers: "My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A\'s from the time I was in kindergarten.\"8 She also says that she felt "wounded and frightened"8 when her mother asked her why she did not achieve the best possible and it left her in a peculiar relationship to her parents.
In an article about discrimination of Chinese Americans, it is stated that "for most Chinese the problem is not so much physical barriers, as it is for blacks, as it is a question of identity. Who are you as a Chinese in the United States?"9 This seems to be quite true and can be proved for the parents as well as for the second generation. It might be even the most difficult for the children, since hardly any identification to the parents' country is existent, although others see them as foreigners or immigrants. In the New York Times Article already quoted, the author comments on this argument: "It is particularly difficult for the younger people who have grown up in the United States, still having an Oriental face but not even speaking their parents' language."10 The children mostly feel American, but they are considered Oriental by the others.
Parents often do not understand this difficult situation and want their children to keep their traditions and not to adapt to American culture instead. In an article about Italian immigrants, for example, the parents are described the way that "they want their daughter to grow up in the traditions of their own youth. She must associate only with Italians [...]. She must live in the way that her mother enjoyed as a girl."11 For immigrant children, this is just not possible because of their American friends and their American surroundings.
A similar image is presented in another article about Italians in the U.S.: "[The daughter] is confused by the conflicting signals given to her by [her parents]: 'Get an education, but don't change', 'go out in the larger world but don't become part of it'"12 Here, it gets obvious again, that the family does not want their child to become part of the American society, but to stay with them instead.
These are only few examples of problems occurring in immigrant families, but I think they make already clear that this belonging to two different worlds and cultures at the same time brings huge difficulties to both parents and children and that they have to put all effort into their living harmoniously together. This does not imply, of course, that there cannot be any exceptions, any families living together in harmony, but it is still more likely for immigrant families to encounter these kind of problems than it is for families already living in the U.S. for many generations.


2.Reasons for the occurrence of the culture clash

It is no question that in the case of family problems, there exist millions of reasons why the members do not get along with each other as they should. Since the same applies to immigrant families, I will try to point out just a few more reasons that I have not already mentioned in part IV and that are typical of immigrant families.
First of all, we will certainly recognise that many immigrant parents cannot adjust to society as their American-born children can. In the article already quoted about the Sicilian girl, the author notes that "the friction in Concetta's home is caused by the reluctance and inability of her parents to accept the conditions of their adopted land."13 They try to preserve their own culture and by doing this, they prevent their children from integrating into American society, or it eventually leads to a conflict between the two parts.
M. Heung calls Waverly Jong "the product of two cultures" and adds that it is "unlikely that mother and daughter can achieve perfect identification" because "the burden of differences in personal history and cultural conditioning is too great"14. It is easy to agree here because one understands quickly that Lindo and her daughter have experiences far too different to make it possible to Waverly to become the 'younger self' of her mother.
Whereas Waverly feels at ease in modern American society, Lindo still criticises American behaviour, which can be seen in particular in the scene at the hairdresser's when Mr. Rory talks about Lindo as if she would not understand him, but to Waverly, he acts in a normal way. Lindo does not like the indirect regards her daughter and Mr. Rory exchange in this "American" superficial way.
The mother has a completely different understanding of family and general morality, which gets a lot clearer if one knows a text by L. Tutang, which was written at the time of Lindo's birth and is about the Confucian family system in China: "We knew the family only as the basis of human society. The system colours all our social life. [...] It keeps our young in the places. It overprotects our children, and it is strange how few children rebel and run away. [...] It makes it rude for a young couple to close the door of their room in the family house in daytime, and it makes privacy an unknown word in China.15"
This explains easily, why Waverly complains about the steady protection by her mother, whereas Lindo considers it as something absolutely natural. The daughter is not only annoyed, but she is even embarrassed: "The mother doesn't behave the way a white mother behaves, not knowing any better, so she is a source of humiliation for the daughter."16 Here, we can see that even if the mother tries very hard to please her daughter, she will not always achieve this, because she does not know the ways she would have to do this.
The examples of reasons mentioned make clear that the culture clash is often unavoidable, and that it might only be possible to soothe it by trying to gain better knowledge of the others.