Joy Luck Club Foreshadowing

To guide the reader into following the storyline of The Joy Luck Club, Tan utilizes literary techniques in order to emphasize events and ideas in the novel. One of the various techniques used in the novel is foreshadowing. Lena and her mother, Ying-ying, is one of the four mother-daughter relationships which exemplifies foreshadowing. Lena describes her mother to have the ability to foretell unfortunate events which she views as a pessimistic viewpoint. For example, when Lena was eight years old, Ying-ying warned if Lena did not eat every piece of rice in her bowl that she would end up marrying a bad man. Although concerned with her mother’s pessimistic views, Lena comes to understand Ying-ying when she realizes everything she projected

Throughout Jing-mei’s childhood, she never truly appreciated how much her mother, Suyuan, had done for her. Purchasing an expensive piano and working away to get Jing-mei piano lessons are a couple of the many things her mother has done for her. When Jing-mei became an adult she finally understood how considerate her mother is. Once her mother had passed she grew an appreciation to the physical objects her mother had given her “...sentimental attachment to the piano, and one day she plays Schumann’s piano pieces “Pleading Child” and “Perfectly Contented” and discovers that they are “two halves of the same song”” (Wang). Due to the difficulty of communication, the message of the two songs Suyuan wished to depict was not evident to Jing-mei at the time. Similarly, Jing-mei only valued her mother’s necklace after she passed. Once Jing-mei accepted her mother’s necklace she began to wear it in hopes to absorb and understand Suyuan, “June accepts this as a deep expression of her mother’s love, despite the fact the intricate carvings are opaque to her, carrying secrets she supposes she will never understand” (Gerhardt). If it wasn’t for the troubled relationship they share, then the mother and daughter could have conversed on a deeper