Abstract

Amy Tan is a very notable figure in the contemporary American literature world. On the publication of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), Amy Tan became an instant star in the publishing world, and her second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), was a triumph as well. The readers who loved the first will surely love the second, since both tell the same story and this time Amy Tan had executed The Kitchen God's Wife better in the renditions of mother-daughter relationships and generational and cultural conflict and compromise.
This thesis aims to deal with the emotional entanglements of the mother-daughter interrelationship stemming from Tan’s personal experiences, and also analyze the theme of the generational and cultural conflicts and reconciliation from the perspective of post-colonial feminist criticism. These two aspects interpret the two characters Winnie and her daughter Pearl in The Kitchen God's Wife who come to common ground from distance to understanding and respect. Moreover, they reveal the suffering of women especially the double-marginalized Chinese-American women who have been exposed in the traditional culture for centuries and disclose their influence on the mother-daughter relationship.

Key Words: Chinese-American Women, Post-colonial Feminist Criticism, Cultural Difference, Conflict, Compromise

摘要

谭恩美是当今美国文坛一位十分引人注目的华裔作家。第一部小说《喜福会》（1989）出版后，她在出版界迅速成名。紧接着第二部小说《灶神之妻》（1991）同样获得不小成就。喜欢《喜福会》的读者肯定会喜欢《灶神之妻》，因为两本书讲述的内容相似。在《灶神之妻》中，谭恩美再次展现了在母女之间的感情纠葛的非凡功力，并着眼于全球视野下的文化冲突与和解，传达出新生华裔美国人对自己身份的困惑与焦虑。
本文旨在根据谭恩美的个人经历探讨母女之间的感情纠葛尝试，并从后女权批评主义的角度，分析《灶神之妻》中中国移民母亲雯妮和在美国成长的女儿珍珠之间由于文化差异、民族身份等因素引起的对立冲突的矛盾关系，阐释她们从冲突到融合的过程,从而揭示被传统文化压抑了几个世纪的受苦女性尤其是处在双重文化边缘的华裔女性的生存状态及其对母女关系的影响。

关键词：华裔美国女性，后女性主义批判，文化差异，冲突，妥协

1. Introduction
1. 1 Amy Tan and The Kitchen God's Wife
Novelist Amy Tan is an American of Chinese descent who was born in Oakland, California in 1952, two-and-a-half years after her parents emigrated from China.  Like so many young second-generation Americans who have little or no experience with their parents’ home countries, Amy Tan spent her childhood attempting to understand, as well as to compromise with the contradictions between her ethnicity and the dominant Western culture in which she was raised and educated. She lived in the typical minority way as other Chinese American teenagers did. She was an uneasy Americanized teenager with the expectations of her traditional Chinese parents, while often being isolated as a Chinese girl by the mainstream Americans.