Abstract:

 The Joy Luck Club is the first novel of Amy Tan, the famous Chinese-American writer. In the novel she delineates the life experience of four pairs of Chinese mothers and their American born daughters with their long-existing conflicts and their final reconciliation. Like Amy Tan’s other writings, the author’s ultimate goal of writing this novel is to depict different cultures under these special mother-daughter relationships.
 This paper tries to use symbolism to analyze the conflicts and complex relationships caused by cultural differences and national identities between four Chinese immigrant mothers and daughters. The Joy Luck Club explores conflicts between two generations and two different cultures，in the novel, mothers symbolizes the traditional Chinese culture, while the daughters represent the modern civilization, and mainly concerned with the conflict and contradiction between the “Chinese style” and “American style.” The Joy Luck Club is a novel that reveals the estrangement and conflict and melting between Chinese and American culture．By the relations between mothers and daughters, I will discuss the relations between Chinese and western culture. Through analyzing the works of Amy Tan’s famous The Joy Luck Club the relations between the two generations' conflict from contradiction to understanding, we can see the developing prospect of the conflict between Chinese and western culture.
This paper aims to demonstrate that in the age of globalization a balance should be kept among different cultures and a right attitude towards cultural conflicts should be taken. It also suggests that the native culture should not be thrown away when we learn from others. Instead, it should be transmitted to others.

Key words: The Joy Luck Club; Symbolism; Mother-daughter relationship; Cultural conflicts

1. Introduction
In the novel The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan introduces four pairs of Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters. The daughters have their own choices to make and their own identities to establish. Although their mothers want Chinese obedience from their daughters, they do not want their daughters to be too passive. The Chinese mothers want their daughters to have American-like strength. The daughters work to find compromises their mothers can accept.
Throughout the stories presented in The Joy Luck Club runs the common thread of mother-daughter connectedness and its influence on a daughter’s identity formation. Tan’s portrayal of the intense relationships between and among her characters shows the strength of the ties that bind culture and generation. These firmly undergrad the choices the characters make and the identities they shape as a result of their decisions.