Joy Luck Club Short Story Analysis

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“With time and maturity, Tan says, she gained a sense of pride in her heritage and formed a connection with her mother” (“The Joy Luck Club” 235). Like their author, the daughters in The Joy Luck Club experience a transformation in attitude towards their mothers and China over the course of the story, but the essential theme is more universal than that. Through the relationships of Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club speaks to not only generational and cultural struggles within immigrant families but the struggle of all people to discover a unique identity. The plots in each of the sixteen short stories intertwine to resolve the conflicts between mothers and daughters so that they can live in …show more content…

The book is divided into four sections, and in each section, four of the characters speak. The middle two sections are narrated by the four daughters, and the first and last sections are told by the mothers (Tan 2). The mothers’ stories are separated from their daughters’ because their lives and thoughts are disconnected at first. As the story goes on, the mothers influence the path of their daughters’ stories more and vice versa. The mothers start and end the book because although their children are at more critical moments in their lives, the mothers are more conflicted internally. Jing-mei bridges the gap between the two generations by introducing and concluding the novel, appearing as herself and her mother’s voice. Jing-mei takes her mother’s place on the East side of the mahjong table (Tan 27). This symbolizes the beginning of her physical journey east to China and her new understanding of her heritage. Tan also includes the mah-jong table to tie Jing-mei to her mother even as all the mothers and daughters renew their relationships and retrieve their identities. Each narrator is the central figure in her own story as well as a supporting character in other stories. Jing-mei hears the story of her mother leaving her twin daughters in Kweilin from Suyuan, Suyuan’s husband, and Suyuan’s friends (Tan 243). Tan chose that method so that the reader would experience many …show more content…

All the mothers grew up in post feudal China and emigrated after the Sino-Japanese War. Suyuan described Kweilin of the 1940s to Jing-mei in vivid detail, giving it majestic and ethereal qualities for her young daughter’s bedtime stories (Tan 16). The description made Jing-mei think her mother’s stories may have been fictionalized, because they changed with every telling and seem too magical to be real. Tan alludes that since Jing-mei has never visited Kweilin or anywhere in China, she is disconnected from her mother’s fantasies of her old life. It is difficult for Jing-mei, or any of the daughters, to take their mothers seriously since they tell stories of their youth in the style of Chinese fairy tales. The mothers need their daughters to appreciate them and vice versa in order to feel secure in their identities, but their ranges of experience are so different that it is impossible to relate. The scene changes to bustling San Francisco of the 1950s, when all the mothers have immigrated to America, finding husbands and bearing American-born children. Lindo has vivid memories of trying to quickly assimilate with American culture by following the advice of an American-raised Chinese girl before recognizing that nothing could prepare her for American society (Tan 222). It pains her that

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