喜福会英文观后感

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 happiness 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 extensiveness——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 message——we must guess 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 embarrassing 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 message 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.

 

第二篇:喜福会 英文简介 读后感

2011—2012—2英语阅读(4)期中作业

姓名 田小星 班级 英语1103班 学号 1101901307 得分

The Joy Luck Club

The author of The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan, who was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. Besides this book, she hasalso written other famous novels, such as The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter and Saving Fish From Drowning. In response to the widely held opinion that she writes with a social aim—to portray the Chinese American experience. Through her writing, Tan approaches issues that are universally applicable to all groups of people. She explores themes of family and memory, as well as the conflicts of culture that arise in so many American communities.

The Joy Luck Club contains sixteen interwoven stories about conflicts between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American—raised daughters.The novel consists of four sections,each section contains four separative narratives. In the first section, four mothers, Lindo, Ying ying, and An mei, recollect their relationship with their nature mothers clearly one by one. However, their daughters' recollection of them will never be so clear. In the second section, these daughters, Waverly, Jing mei,Lena, and Rose recollect their childhood relationship with their mothers respectively. They tell their childhood stories so clearly and touchingly that it can powerfully prove what their mothers worry about at least is partially unnecessary and unimportant. In the third section, the four daughters narrate their adult dilemmas—troubles in marriages and with their careers. Although they believe that their mothers' antiquated ideas do not have anything concerned about their own American lifestyles, but their search for solutions inevitably brings them back to their relationships with the older generation. In the final section, the mothers come up with some practical solutions and support their daughters, in the process learning more about themselves.

After reading The Joy Luck Club briefly, I have come to think of something. From my standpoint, Suyuan' story is representative of the struggle to maintain the relationships between mothers and daughters across cultural and generational gaps. The major conflict is that the mothers try to instill their daughters with an understanding of their heritage, and also attempt to save the pain they had in China. The daughters, on the other hand, often see their mothers' attempts as a form of unrealistic challenging. Both the mothers and the daughters struggle with issues of identity: the mothers try to reconcile their Chinese pasts with their American presents, the daughters attempt to find a balance between independence and loyalty to their heritage. Thus when Lindo fears that the American and Chinese cultures cannot mix, she is contemplating the combination of two extremes. In reality, each identity is mixed, just as the American culture is not wholly about independence and liberty, the Chinese culture is not wholly about passivity and self restraint. Nonetheless, the challenging of finding a way to combine aspects of both into one's own unique personality is a challenge faced not only by Waverly, but all of the daughters in this novel. Besides, this book emphasizes the importance of will. The sentence that "will becomes a way not only of achieving one's desires but of achieving those desires in the face of hardship and oppression, in the face of hostile and controlling external forces." is my favourite. So keep it in your mind that perseverance is victory.

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