Abstract: Amy Tan is a representative of Chinese American writers. This paper, focusing on her fourth work The Bonesetter’s Daughter, aims to carry out the research on the relationship between the mother and daughter who live in two different times and are affected by two cultures from the perspective of the dilemma of choosing between family educational patterns. It discusses the conflicts between the Chinese American mother and her daughter in terms of the educational patterns and analyzes the causes. This paper reveals the joint effort of the two generations to try to understand each others.
Key words: Chinese American; family education; conflict
摘要：谭恩美是美国华裔作家的代表人物。《接骨师的女儿》是她的第四部作品并极具自传性。本篇论文将从美国华裔家庭教育两难视角进一步探讨分别接受二个不同时期文化影响的母女之间的关系，从而来详细地阐述在《接骨师的女儿》中移民后的母女在教育方式上的冲突，并揭示产生冲突的原因。同时，综观当时中西方各自的社会背景及在此背景下的教育方式的各自特点，就不难发现这两代人寻找相互理解的努力。
关键词：美国华裔；家庭教育；冲突
Amy Tan, a female Chinese-American novelist, appeared on the literary stage in 1989 by publishing her first novel The Joy Luck Club. She continued receiving the public’s attention by her following works like The Kitchen Wife’s God, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Saving Fish from Drowning. Most of her works focus on the theme of the mother-daughter relationship; The Bonesetter’s Daughter is no exception. The art comes from our daily life and so do our writings. What’s more, both of the art and the writings are beyond our life as they are decorated with more ample emotions (Chernyshevsky, 1855). The inspiration of The Bonesetter’s Daughter is closely related to her own experiences. In her adolescence, she was once at odds with her mother about her boyfriend. The fierce quarrel led her mother to hold a knife near her neck for almost twenty minutes, and her mother didn’t put down the knife until Amy Tan begged for her life. Later, she had two car accidents and she was threatened by a robber with a gun. In her twenties, one of her friends was strangled by a housebreaker on her birthday and Amy Tan was required to identify her body by the police. All those events which seldom happen to us just happened to her and gave her a deeply mental hurt resulting in her dropping out of her master program. However, just as the ancient Chinese saying goes, “The poet’s misfortune will constitute the wealth of poetry.” All the miseries Amy Tan suffered during her youth have directly transferred into the materials she could use in her novelistic creation. Amy Tan, the author of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, just wrote it based on her own experiences. Because of that, the hero in her novel is more vivid than in other works.
