Review on Chinese Parenting System

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CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY

A. Object of the Study

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is one of Amy Tan’s best-selling works. Tan is known as the writer of the New York Bestseller The Joy Luck Club 1989 and The Kitchen God’s Wife 1991. Tan also has several books, such as The Hundred Secret Senses 1998, The Opposite of Fate 2003, and Saving Fish From Drowning 2005. The Bonesetter’s Daughter is first published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 2001. The work was brought into an opera based on the novel. It is premiered on 13 September 2008 at the War Memorial Opera House of San Francisco Opera. Amy Tan wrote the libretto for the opera. There were one prologue and two acts that both of the acts consist of two scenes. This study used the novel that is published by Harper Perennial in 2004. The Bonesetter’s Daughter consists of 339 pages and it is divided into prologue, three chapters, and epilogue. The prologue in the novel entitled Truth. It is the introduction from LuLing Liu Young as the woman major character. The first chapter takes setting in the present day in San Francisco, introduces Ruth Young, a Chinese American woman and her Chinese Immigrant mother, LuLing. LuLing suffers from a dementia and Ruth becomes aware of the effect of her mother’s memory loss. The chapter is divided into 7 sub chapter, starts from One until Seven. The middle chapter from this novel tells the memoir written by LuLing. It tells the past life of LuLing when she was in China. This section reveals the sad story of LuLing, her mother, her Chinese family, and the reason she moves to America. The third chapter focuses more on Ruth ’s perspective after she knows about her mother’s story. Amy Tan’s work is known with its story about the relationship between mother and daughter. Like Tan’s previous work, The Bonesetter’s Daughter also deals with mother-daughter relationship and its conflict in culture. The differences in American and Chinese culture create conflicts to Ruth Young as a modern woman who grows up with American culture and her conservative mother with her strong Chinese belief. Later on, after Ruth knows the story of her mother’s past life, she knows how to react toward the culture. B. Approach of the Study The approach that is used in this study is the sociocultural-historical approach. Rohrberger and Woods in Reading and Writing About Literature state that Critics whose major interest is the sociocultural-historical approach insist that the only way to locate the real work is in reference to the civilization that produced it. They define civilization as the attitude and actions of a specific group of people and point out that literature takes these attitudes and actions as its subject matter Rohrberger and Woods, 1971: 9. The citation from Rohrberger and Woods emphasizes that sociocultural- historical is the approach that can be used by the researchers who study in the