The Impact of the Characters’ Traumatic Memories on Their Family Patterns in The Joy Luck Club

Abstract

In recent years, the study of The Joy Luck Club cannot get rid of the words “cultural conflict between the East and the West”, “post-colonial feminism”, “Chinese identity”, “mother-daughter relationship”. And Tan’s The Joy Luck Club on the surface seems to write about the mode of getting along with mothers and daughters and their difficult life under the conflicts of the two cultural backgrounds between China and the United States. But making a deep analysis, the family formed by them has a unique family model, and in addition to Chinese and Western cultural conflicts and other factors that affect these four families, there is also the traumatic memory of the mothers and daughters. This paper attempts to analyze the traumas of four couples of mothers and daughters in the novel, explore the sources of these traumas. Furthermore, it will explore the impact of these traumas on the relationship between mothers and daughters, and then find out what kind of family model will be formed by the traumatized mothers and daughters.