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Thesis settings, symbolism in the short story the joy luck club by amy tan
The joy luck club amy tan analysis
Major themes of the joy luck club
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In life we sometimes experience cultural differences. In The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan shows how mother daughter relationships are affected by these cultural differences. Therefore each of the mothers and daughters has a different view on their Chinese culture. Lindo Jong is the mother of Waverly. Lindo believes that her daughter should be the best of the best at something like all the other Chinese girls she knows of. Lindo also believes that Waverly should marry a Chinese man and is in a constant argument with her about marrying an American man. Lindo believes that it is important for Waverly to marry a Chinese man so that her Chinese heritage will not die out. Throughout the book Lindo begins to warm up to the idea of her daughter marrying an American man but still does not support the idea one hundred percent. Waverly Jong, the daughter of Lindo believes she is more American than Chinese. She does not understand why her mother hates the idea of her marrying an American man so much. Waverly knows her mother will not like her fiancé, so she avoids introducing him to her mo...
No relationship is ever perfect no matter how great it seems. In the novel The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan, she tells the story of a few mother daughter pairs that are in a group named the Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club is a group of women who come together once a week to play mahjong. The founder of the Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo, dies, leaving her daughter Jing-mei to take her place in the club. Her daughter, Jing-mei, receives money from the other members of the club to travel to China in order to find her mother's twin daughters who were left many years ago. In this book you get more of the details of this family and a few more. Amy Tan uses the stories of Jing-mei and Suyuan, Waverly and Jindo, and An-mei and Rose to portray her theme of, mother daughter relationships can be hard at times but they are always worth it in the end.
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 (289).” Living in America, it was effortless for Waverly to accept American circumstances, simply because she was born into liberties of America without a true realization of what advantages she had gained effortlessly. Her mother was far less fortunate however, having struggled so hard to find her own independence while attempting to keep true to her cultural background. 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. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities . . . How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring
Traditions, heritage and culture are three of the most important aspects of Chinese culture. Passed down from mother to daughter, these traditions are expected to carry on for years to come. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, daughters Waverly, Lena, Rose and June thoughts about their culture are congested by Americanization while on their quests towards self-actualization. Each daughter struggles to find balance between Chinese heritage and American values through marriage and professional careers.
The Joy Luck Club is an emotional tale about four women who saw life as they had seen it back in China. Because the Chinese were very stereotypic, women were treated as second class citizens and were often abused. Through sad and painful experiences, these four women had tried to raise their daughters to live the American dream by giving them love and support, such things which were not available to them when they were young. These women revealed their individual accounts in narrative form as they relived it in their memories. These flashbacks transport us to the minds of these women and we see the events occur through their eyes. There were many conflicts and misunderstandings between the two generations due to their differences in upbringing and childhood. In the end, however, these conflicts would bring mother and daughter together to form a bond that would last forever.
Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club describes the lives of first and second generation Chinese families, particularly mothers and daughters. Surprisingly The Joy Luck Club and, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts are very similar. They both talk of mothers and daughters in these books and try to find themselves culturally. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs.
The conflict between Waverly and her mother was very realistic due to the nature that many mothers and daughters have different views which causes disagreements. The people of Chinese descent have their Chinese heritage, but struggled to keep true to their traditions while living around American culture. The major conflict in the story, the clash of different cultures, led to the weakening of the relationship between the two characters. For example, when Waverly reentered the apartment after running away, she saw the "remains of a large fish, its fleshy head still connected to bones swimming upstream in vain escape" (Tan 508). Waverly saw herself as the fish, stripped clean by her mother 's power, unable to break free. Through the major conflict,
The Joy Luck Club daughters incontestably become Americanized as they continue to grow up. They lose their sense of Chinese values, or Chinese tradition in which their mothers tried to drill into their minds. The four young women adopt the American culture and way of life, and they think differently than their traditional Chinese mothers do, upsetting the mothers greatly. The daughters do not even understand the culture of their mothers, and vice versa. They find that the American way of thinking is very different from that of the Chinese.
The second and third sections are about the daughters' lives, and the vignettes in each section trace their personality growth and development. Through the eyes of the daughters, we can also see the continuation of the mothers' stories, how they learned to cope in America. In these sections, Amy Tan explores the difficulties in growing up as a Chinese-American and the problems assimilating into modern society. The Chinese-American daughters try their best to become "Americanized," at the same time casting off their heritage while their mothers watch on, dismayed. Social pressures to become like everyone else, and not to be different are what motivate the daughters to resent their nationality. This was a greater problem for Chinese-American daughters that grew up in the 50's, when it was not well accepted to be of an "ethnic" background.
The film explains the difference between Chinese and American values of gender in marriage and family as well. It clearly shows how Chinese woman is expected to good wives for their chosen husband. Girls are promised at an early age to a man. In the film Aunty Lindo had an arranged marriage when she was only four years old. In an American marriage, it is supposed to be based on a love and connection between two people.
One striking similarity in the writings is that all characters lose their heritage over time. In “The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl”, Elizabeth was forced to attend Chinese school by her mother to retain her Chinese heritage and to speak proficient Chinese. However, she hated the Chinese School and strongly preferred speaking English over Chinese. She...
The Chinese mothers, so concentrated on the cultures of their own, don't want to realize what is going on around them. They don't want to accept the fact that their daughters are growing up in a culture so different from their own. Lindo Jong, says to her daughter, Waverly- "I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents' promise. This means nothing to you because to you, promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on T.V., she no longer has a promise."(Tan 42) Ying Ying St.Clair remarks- "...because I remained quiet for so long, now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid."(Tan 64)
...can sence that old Chinese way of thinking when Waverly’s mother says: “We are not concerning this girl. This girl not have concerning for us” (Tan 1117).
Another issue that makes Mr. Chu's transition into America so hard is his interactions, or lack there of, with his son's American wife Martha. Martha feels Mr. Chu is a burden to her and her profession as an at home writer and a mother of one. Therefore she doesn't give Mr. Chu the time of day, but instead ignores him completely even though they are living under the same roof. In class we learned that filial piety is an important aspect of Chinese culture.
The struggle of these second generational daughter’s to find their own niche is discussed more at length by Ben Xu from St. Mary’s college of California in his academic journal, Memory And The Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, where he states “The daughters, unlike their mothers, are American not by choice, but by birth. Neither the Chinese nor the American culture is equipped to define them except in rather superficial terms.” (Xu 15) his analysis paints a dark picture for average Chinese American daughter who is in a difficult position being neither fully-Chinese nor All- American whose struggle to choose a side, and the realization that neither one fit’s, creates a mini- identity crisis. To make matters more difficult The mother’s spurred on by fear that their daughter’s will lose total connection with their ethnic origins, push harder, which only makes their daughters further retreat within themselves. As a result there is nearly a complete aversion by the daughters in the novel to anything relating their mother’s traditional background, resulting in a loss of culture and a mini failure on behalf of the mothers.
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).