Mothers and Daughters in Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan's novel, The Joy Luck Club, explores the relationships and experiences of four Chinese mothers and four Chinese-American daughters. The difference in upbringing of those women born during the first quarter of this century in China, and their daughters born in California, is undeniable.
From the beginning of the novel, you hear Suyuan Woo tell the story of "The Joy Luck Club," a group started by some Chinese women during World War II, where "we feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy." (p. 12) Really, this was their only joy. The mothers grew up during perilous times in China. They all were taught "to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat [their] own bitterness." (p. 241)
Though not many of them grew up terribly poor, they all had a certain respect for their elders, and for life itself. These Chinese mothers were all taught to be honorable, to the point of sacrificing their own lives to keep any family members' promise. Instead of their daughters, who "can promise to come to dinner, but if she wants to watch a favorite movie on TV, she no longer has a promise" (p. 42), "To Chinese people, fourteen carats isn't real gold . . . [my bracelets] must be twenty-four carats, pure inside and out." (p. 42)
Towards the end of the book, there is a definite line between the differences of the two generations. Lindo Jong, whose daughter, Waverly, doesn't even know four Chinese words, describes the complete difference and incompatibility of the two worlds she tried to connect for her daughter, American circumstances and Chinese character. She explains that there is no lasting shame in being born in America, and that as a minority you are the first in line for scholarships. Most importantly, she notes that "In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you." (p. 289)
Living in America, it was easy for Waverly to accept American circumstances, to grow up as any other American citizen. As a Chinese mother, though, she also wanted her daughter to learn the importance of Chinese character. She tried to teach her Chinese-American daughter "How to obey parents and listen to your mother's mind.
After the Revolutionary War, the Massachusetts legislature imposed high taxes to pay war debts. Rural farmers could not pay their taxes and faced forfeiture of their farms. Resentment of the taxes increased to the point that the farmers began to break up court sessions to prevent judges from ruling that specific farms should be sold to pay tax bills.
Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves – about how we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside – but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant. (36)
Hernandez, Kelly Lytle. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Berkeley, CA: University of California,
"My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America" (491). This ideology inspired Jing-mei’s mother to work hard to create a better life for herself and her family in a new country. The search of the American dream exerts a powerful influence on new arrivals in the United States. However, realizing that they may not achieve the dream of material success and social acceptance, parents tend to transfer that burden to their children. It is a burden where dreams usually fall short of expectations.
The movie, The Joy Luck Club, focuses around the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters. The story takes place a few months after Junes mother, Suyuan has died. The mothers and daughters hold very different principles, where the mothers are still very traditional to their Chinese upbringings the daughters are much more “American.” The movie can be viewed from the Feminist Literary Theory, since the 8 main characters are female. The women’s life stories are told through a series of flashback scenes that deal heavily with female gender roles and the expectations of women. While the mothers and their daughter grew up in vastly different worlds, some of their experiences and circumstances correlate solely due to that fact that they experienced them because they are females.
Oftentimes the children of immigrants to the United States lose the sense of cultural background in which their parents had tried so desperately to instill within them. According to Walter Shear, “It is an unseen terror that runs through both the distinct social spectrum experienced by the mothers in China and the lack of such social definition in the daughters’ lives.” This “unseen terror” is portrayed in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as four Chinese women and their American-born daughters struggle to understand one another’s culture and values. The second-generation women in The Joy Luck Club prove to lose their sense of Chinese values, becoming Americanized.
The city of Cardiff in the year 1648 A.D. was actually a rather small town in Whales, with a population of around 1500, it was nowhere near being the most prominent Welsh town. Located on the coast with a river running close by, Cardiff had a small port used by fisherman mostly. This close proximity to the river and coast left Cardiff susceptible to damage from rising tides. Cardiff was a very fair town, with it's origins coming from a Roman fort by the name of Caer-Didi. This fort was abandoned after the Romans left Britain, and was not truly occupied and kept up until 1081 A.D. when William I, of England began building a keep within the walls of the fort. Eventually the keep was renovated toward the Victorian era, and a small township grew in the shadow of the castle, mostly made of English settlers.
The four daughters: Waverly, Lena, Rose, and Jing-Mei are all Americans. Even though they absorb some of the traditions of Chinese culture they are raised in America and American ideals and values. This inability to communicate and the clash between cultures create rifts between mothers and daughters. The hardest problem communicating emerges between Suyuan and Jing-Mei. Suyuan is a very strong woman who lost everything she ever had in China: "her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls" (141).
In The Joy Luck Club, the novel traces the fate of the four mothers-Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair-and their four daughters-June Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. Through the experiences that these characters go through, they become women. The mothers all fled China in the 1940's and they all retain much of their heritage. Their heritage focuses on what is means to be a female, but more importantly what it means to be an Asian female.
Known as one the largest global home-furnishing retailers, IKEA currently has over 139,000 employees located in 53 countries and generates roughly 39.3 billion US dollars in annual sales (IKEA, 2014). Ingvar Kamprad began selling different types of items and founded the company in Agunnaryd, Sweden in 1943. Kamprad found that his greatest entrepreneurial opportunity was in furniture. Many households at that time were changing from receiving furniture that was handed down to desiring new, inexpensive, and stylish furniture. Kamprad was able to find a business opportunity to change the current social situation since a lot of the furniture was priced high at the time. He wanted to be able to offer his customers a wide selection of functional and well-designed furniture at a price many could afford (Bartlet & Nanda, 1996). Kamprad had a better understanding of what the customer desired and how to go about meeting those desires at prices that were lower than other furniture companies, in turn creating a competitive environment (De Kluyver & Pearce, 2011).
Understanding the Chinese culture was confusing for Kingston. “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese , how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (Kingston 223). Kingston questions her tradition and she doesn’t seem very sure what it is. She questions whether what her mother did by...
"Hamlet" William Shakespeare (Author), Cyrus Hoy (Editor). 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.
Financial Advantages, Strategic Advantages and Management Advantages. The financial advantages may be higher sales, and for the companies with more market shares; higher margins. IKEA is one of the leaders in its market place, and therefore many other brands in that particular sector may be 'hitchhiker' brands following us and other leaders (such as MFI and DFS).
IKEA know as a unique furniture business that involved the customer’s needs with the potential on the factory floor. IKEA have owns abilities to develops its products directly based on the understanding and knowledge about the life and home challenges among the customer’s needs with low cost and high quality product. The skilled suppliers create the furniture that can adapt with the product size and constructions that enable them to produce, package and provided delivered stock in proficient way to all customers. It also put effort in developing, improvement and save resources. Apart f...
Hamlet: one of the most analyzed tragic heroes in all of literature. Hamlet, the main character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is conflicted throughout the whole play. He obsesses over avenging his father’s death, and this leads to rash, irresponsible actions that cause others to suffer, as well. He plans to kill Claudius, his uncle, for murdering his father and then marrying his mother. In an act of outrage, Hamlet unknowingly kills Polonius, the King’s assistant, instead. This creates even more problems because now someone else’s father is dead. Hamlet is somewhat of an inconsistent character; he’s different almost every time we see him. Hamlet displays characteristics of depression, irony, timidity, and being hurt.