喜福会书评 英文

The Expression of Love

——Book Review on The Joy Luck Club

“The Joy Luck Club” is the story about the four central pairs of Chinese

immigrant mothers and daughters born in America: Suyuan Woo and Jing-mei “June” Woo, An-mei Hsu and Rose Hsu Jordan, Lindo Jong and Waverly Jong, and Ying-ying St.Clair and Lena St.Clair. The novel shows us conflicts between mothers’ hopes and daughters’ disobedience and rebellion. The conflicts and misunderstanding may result from the generation gap and cultural difference, however, in my point of view, what rigidifies their relationship is the way of expressing love. It is no doubt that the mothers and the daughters love each other deeply and mothers spare no effort to give daughters everything they could provide. From mothers’ perspective, they hope daughters a brighter further and full of promises. So they express their love by planning daughters’ blueprints and then impose their will on daughters and force them to walk their scheduled path. And for daughters, especially those live in an American, they struggle for individual freedom and wish to live their own way. Due to schemed future, they cannot accurately make a definition for their identities. Under this condition, criticism form mothers and rebellion for daughters become how they express love. In this way, love becomes a heavy burden for both of them.

Mothers and daughters need to express their love in the right way. So empathy and effective communications is of great importance. Mothers should show their love according to their daughters’ interest or at least make them know why they make the choice for them. Fortunately, the novel ends up with the reunion of mothers and the

daughters. It is evident that due to mothers’ telling frank stories and daughters’ patient hearing, soul communication has happened among them. They perceive the deep love form each other. So expression of love is significant and remarkable. The novel teaches us how to express our love and is worth reading.

参考文献

[1] Tan, Amy. 1989. The Joy Luck Club [M]. New York: Ivy Books.

[2] A Study of Communication Barriers Between Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.