Mainstream Culture and the Marginal Culture

Mainstream Culture and the Marginal Culture

Everyone may have an American dream, and actually America is really a land of opportunity and hope. However, when four mothers gave up everything they had in china and came to this new country with high expectation, things were not going very well. Though they had a very auspicious name for the club：“The Joy Luck Club” hoping good luck can always around them, they couldn’t stop bad luck knocking on their doors. There were so much unpleasant things, such as conflicts, hardship and disappoint.

However, why those conflicts were so intensive? Why the daughter-mother relationship became so terrible? I think that culture shock can explain this. For the mother side, as the first immigrate generation, although they had buried their past in china, they couldn’t throw their deep rooted tradition values away that had set in their blood deeply. But at that time, based on the individualism, the American cultural was the mainstream culture, while Chinese culture was regarded as the marginal culture, and the American culture had a great bias on our marginal culture. So, it’s not difficult for us to imagine how hard the life the mothers led. They left their motherland; they became to the minority in this society; they tried so hard to feed into this country, however, they failed. What’s worse, they were despised by the mainstream culture. They were in the margin of the society; they lacked a sense of security. Fortunately, they had their daughters, which were all their hope. So, they devoted all their efforts to their daughters. They cultivated their daughters to be genius by Chinese traditional way. In their minds, they totally had rights to dominate their daughters’ lives.

For the America-raised daughters’ part, they were given double identities since they came to this world. On one hand, they were born and grew up in America, they pursued for freedom, and they hated to be restrained and thirsted for getting rid of the control. On the other hand,