【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 紙……………………. ………………. …………………recognizes that while passivity may once have been the only option for women, women no longer need live this way. She wonders now how to rectify the seemingly irrepressible force of inheritance, how to extricate her mother’s passivity from her daughter. There is no doubt that it is American circumstances that give Anmei this thought. Yingying St. ClairYingying was born in the year of the Tiger, a creature of force and stealth. However, when her nursemaid tells her that girls should be meek and passive, Yingying begins to lose her sense of autonomous will. Furthermore, at an early age Yingying’s profound belief in fate and her personal destiny led to a policy of passivity and even listlessness. Always listening to omens and signs, she never paid attention to her inner feelings. Because she believed that she was “destined” to marry a vulgar family friend, she did nothing to seriously prevent the marriage, and even came to love her husband against her will. So she made no real effort to resist, and the tragic course of events that followed destroyed her spirit. After she aborted her child, Yingying thought she would take advantage of the cunning, “black” side of her Tiger spirit and wait for a ripe opportunity to reenter life in full force. However, when she meets Clifford St. Clair, Yingying displays the same fatalism that led her to her first marriage disaster. Although she neither likes nor dislikes the foreign merchant, she “knows” that he embodies a message: that the black side of her would soon fade away. On entering America with the man, Yingying’s identity was altered by changing her name, and also, accidentally, her birthday. She was held as a “displaced person” at the immigration station, and this image persists as a motif throughout the story. When the St. Clairs move to a new neighborhood, Lina’s father sees the shift as a rise in status, but Yingying judges her new apartment by different standards. She deems the house out of balance and feels a sense of foreboding, but she finds herself unable to explain her fears. She dose not refuse to speak out her actual worries and dissatisfaction, but she has no way to speak out. The dissatisfaction stems in part from her first move, from China to America, and from her more general failure to keep a balance between both sides of her life, both sides of her identity. The first marriage had already drained her spirit to such an extent that as soon as she stopped having to struggle to live, she became the ghost of the tiger she had once been. Yingying has decided to make a change, because she realizes that she has passed on her passivity and fatalism to her daughter Lina. Seeing her daughter in an unhappy marriage, she urges her to take control. “Her wisdom is like a bottomless lake. You throw stones in and they sink into the darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything. I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body, but when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away even since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore. And now I must tell her everything about my past. It is the only way to pull her to where she can be saved.” (Amy Tan, 1989: P236). She tells Lina her story for the first time, hoping that she might learn from her mother’s own failure to take initiative and instead e to express her thoughts 裝訂線……………….……. …………. …………. …… 第 5 頁(yè)論 文 專 用 紙……………………. ………………. …………………and feelings. “Many years’ hardships and suffering have already made me more sensitive and accurate about all kinds of signs. I must use the painful horn of the “tiger” to poke my daughter to awake her. I know that she will fight with me, because we were both born in the year of Tiger, and to fight is the nature of tiger. But I will win her, because I love her.” (Amy Tan, 1989: P246). In this belief in astrology Yingying finds a sort of positive counterpart to her earlier, debilitating superstitions and fatalism, for it is a belief not in the inevitability of external events but in the power of an internal quality. Cultural identity of the daughtersWhile the daughters in the novel are genetically Chinese (except for Lina who is half Chinese) and have been raised in mostly Chinese households, they also identify themselves with and feel at home in modern American culture. Only as they mature, the daughters begin to sense that their identities are inplete and bee interested in their Chinese heritage. Jingmei WooIn a way, Jingmei Woo is the main character of the novel. Structurally, her narratives serve as bridge between the two generations of storytellers, as Jingmei speaks both for herself and for her recent deceased mother, Suyuan. She also bridges America and China. Jingmei denied during adolescence that she had any internal Chinese aspects, insisting that her Chinese identity was limited only to her external features and going by an English name “June”. She believes that her mother’s constant criticism bespeaks a lack of affection, when in fact her mother’s severity and high expectation are expressions of love and faith in her daughter. All of the other motherdaughter pairs experience the same misunderstanding, which in some ways may be seen to stem from cultural differences. “The aunties are looking at me as if I had bee crazy right before their eyes. And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters as ignorant and indifferent as me of the principles our mothers bring to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese……Without any other means, they watch their daughters grow up day by day, and then marry and bear children, but without any connecting hope or possibility passed from generation to generation.” (Amy Tan, 1989: P30). But when she makes a journey to China, she begins to understand her