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“The Joy Luck Club” and guidance for Chinese young people in Australian Schools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2016

Angela Back
Angela Back*
Affiliation:
Queensland
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Extract

“The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan, focuses upon some of the issues which are on-going concerns for Chinese students from a variety of Chinese countries when living in Western societies. Amy Tan would probably agree with Hsien Rin (1975) that “the Chinese have a remarkable capacity to incorporate other cultural components into the self and to formulate a double identity, all the while maintaining a deep sense of being Chinese” (p.155). Her characters certainly incorporate many of the American values and take on its protective colouring. The novel traces the way four sets of daughters – all Western women, professionals, born in America – are forced to explore their Chineseness through their relationships with their mothers. Amy Tan's quartet of American-born women are glimpsed as teenagers reacting against the ‘otherness’ which their ethnic background has loaded them with, struggling to find an identity for themselves apart from their families' (and particularly their mothers') views of what being a good daughter involves. It is only later, as they face up to some of the insecurities of adulthood, that they appreciate the strengths of Chinese family life and explore what it means to be Chinese.

Type
Professionals Issues
Information
Journal of Psychologists and Counsellors in Schools , Volume 4 , November 1994 , pp. 107 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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