从跨文化交际角度分析电影《推手》

从跨文化交际角度分析电影《推手》

作者：刘玉菡

来源：《青年文学家》2012年第11期

摘要：本文运用跨文化交际的适应理论对电影《推手》中主人公所经历的文化震荡和跨文化适应过程进行了分析和解读。通过对电影中典型场景的分析，指出电影不仅深刻描写了跨文化适应过程中人们要经历的情感痛苦和迷茫,而且客观呈现了人们在跨文化适应过程中从深感疏离到渴望融合的心理过程,能为即将体验跨文化适应过程的人们提供情感和心理准备。

关键词：跨文化交际；文化休克；文化适应；交际技巧

作者简介：刘玉菡（1989-），女，汉族，河南商丘人，为郑州大学外语学院在读研究生，主攻英语语言文学专业英美文学方向。

[中图分类号]：I235.1[文献标识码]：A

[文章编号]：1002-2139(2012)-11-0239-01

Directed by Ang Lee, the movie Pushing Hands tells a story goes around a family immigrated from China to America. The drama conflict was launched from describing the unharmonious between the Chinese father-in-law and a American daughter-in-law. From the movie, we could see the contradiction between traditional Chinese and modern American conditions and customs, and the confutation and frustration people feel in the adaptation process.

In the movie, the director mainly uses some macro level signs to compare those two cultures, for instance, Chinese Taichi versus American jogging; Chinese penmanship versus American computer typing; Chinese food culture which stresses on the balance of Yin and Yang versus American snack culture which values much on saving time and efforts, to list just a few aspects. There is a big distinguish between China and America due to the different cultural background. In America, adults prefer to live away from their parents, especially after they get married, and the elder citizens want to live alone likewise. However, this kind of lifestyle can not be accepted by Chinese, let alone the aged. To an American, according to the law, immediate relatives include his children, but not his parents, though he himself as the immediate relative of his parents. And this also seems unreasonable and unacceptable to we Chinese.

On the viewpoint of family, Mr. Zhu succeeded the traditional conception of forming a big family. In Chinese culture, the role of father occupies an important place in a family. Patriarchal first is a main principle in Chinese traditional life and philosophy. While as the cross-sectional of American mainstream culture, Marsha holds that everyone gets along with others equally and there is no need to have an authority at all. Taking care of aged parents is often viewed as a tremendous burden in America, which is not honored highly (Xu Lisheng, 2004: 94). Americans don’t feel obliged

to raise their parents while most American parents are not willing to be a burden of their children, either (Hu Wenzhong, 2005: 180).

The cultural conflict between Mr. Zhu and his American daughter-in-law was incarnated from two aspects: the macroscopic conflict between American mainstream culture and Chinese traditional culture, and the inner conflict of the cross-national family. As for the reasons, firstly, both of them can not understand the language of each other, so it is impossible for them to communicate adequately. Secondly, both of them have a deep discrimination and misunderstanding on the culture that represented by the other. For example, Marsha considers that Taichi as one kind of ‘violence’, and Mr. Zhu can not understand Marsha’s eating habits. Thirdly, both of them are lack of some conceptions and skills of cross cultural communication, and they don’t know how to get along well with people from an alien culture.

By the reasons of different cultural environment as well as lacking of skills for cross cultural communication, culture shock occurs in the bi-national family and both of them suffered a lot in the cultural adaptation. This paper studied scenes of the movie, and expounded how the movie presents the confusion and agony the new immigrates would suffer, and probes into the psychological procession of trying to get away from the alienation and formulating the eagerness for reception by the new environment in cultural adaptation.

Reference：

[1]、Larry A. Samovar, Richard Porter, Lisa Stefani. Communication Between Cultures [M], Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. 2000.

[2]、许力生. 跨文化交际英语教程[M] . 上海：上海外语教育出版社，2004.

[3] 胡文仲. 《超越文化的屏障》. 北京：外语教学与研究出版社，2005.