My Reflection of The Joy Luck Club
I wonder that when seeing the name The Joy Luck Club most people would treat it as a story filled with happine and love.In fact, besides love, it is also about the cultural conflicts between four daughters and their mothers.
The film is based on the best seller by Amy Tan of the same name.It shows us the lives of four Chinese women who were immigrants to America during the 1950s.As a mother, each of them has a lot of problems with their daughter because of cultural conflicts.The misunderstanding of love between the mothers and their American-raised daughters, the clash between the generations and cultures, and the struggle for the women to fight for equity touch every audience’s heart.Though I was also attracted by something with extensivene——I want to talk about some points about the language.
I had learnt that what are high context communication and low context communication and what is different between them.The former is one in which most of the information is internalized in a person, while very little in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the meage——we must gue what the real meaning of the words is; while the other is the opposite.Chinese just the stands for the former and English is the representative of the latter.An interesting scene in the movie just shows us this.
When Waverly’s boyfriend Richie had a dinner with Waverly’s big Chinese family for the first time, he made some stupid mistakes.He brought his typical American habit when the they were eating and he couldn’t understand what Lindo( Waverly’s mother) mean when she said “ He has an appetite”.When Lindo brought a dish which she was very proud of, as a Chinese, she still said some formulae that the dish was not salty enough and it was too bad to eat; that suggested that everyone around the table should speak highly of her dish after their first degustation; while Richie didn’t understand that Chinese all like to be modest and he criticized Lindo’s cooking, just saying what he thought in his mind directly.What Richie did led to a very embarraing atmosphere in the dinner and made Lindo very disappointed and
disgraced.The misunderstanding of a different culture and a different language is the mainly reason causing the awkward occasion.If Richie had known what he had faced with was a group of people with different culture and saying a high context language, and had done some preparation for that different traditional Chinese dinner, he could have avoid to making so many foolish mistake.To understand what a Chinese mean you could not just follow the superficial meage transmitted by his words, instead, you should connect those words to his cultural background and the situation you are in.
By appreciating the movie we could realize the culture of a people from their language.In this movie the cultural conflicts between the mothers’ traditional Chinese concept and the daughters’ up-to-date American concept are fully described by their dialogues and soliloquies.In conclusion, a language is really the mirror of a culture; and if we want to understand the marrow of a culture we could appreciate its language.
