Chapter 1 Introduction

In the novel The Joy Luck Club written by Amy Tan, the four Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters have experienced cultural conflicts, cultural understanding as well as blending.However, cultural understanding and blending can not occur overnight. It is a long process with much pain and misunderstanding. Thanks to these mothers’ great efforts, gradually, their daughters understand them and the Chinese culture as well. In this way, cultural understanding and blending are achieved.According to the basic concepts of the cross-cultural communication research, the communication of people from different cultural background is a fairly complicated process. During communication, their differences in cognitive behaviors, values and ways of thinking will result in different understanding of the same matter. Different countries have their particular cultural beliefs in value、religion and customs. Ignorance of the divergence will surely causes the failure of communication. This thesis aims to give a cross-cultural perspective study of The Joy Luck Club and explore the difference of family education between people in absolutely two different cultural backgrounds. 

In this thesis, there will be five chapters to make analysis on the theme. In the first part, some brief introduction about the novel and the structure of this study will be given. In the second chapter of the research, the discussion will be transferred to the difference of cultural norms between American culture and Chinese culture, which means collectivism and individualism. At the same time, there will be analysis of reasons for such difference in this part. After this, the explorations will be given to difference of family education including two parts, namely, the difference of educational concepts and of educational methods in family. In the fourth part of the whole thesis, the emphasis will be placed on the difference of expressing way combined with analysis on their separate expressing ways and the effects brought about on the inter-cultural communication. For the final part of the whole thesis, there will be the conclusion for the research including some findings, suggestions, and limitation of the thesis.