Mother Daughter Relationships

The films The Joy Luck Club (Wang, 1993) and The Story of Mothers and Daughters (Weimberg, 2010) portray various types of the mother daughter relationship. Through these mother and daughter relationships, both films focus on the tension and love in the older years of the daughters lives’ but The Story of Mothers and Daughters focus on the all of the stages of life.

The documentary, The Story of Mothers and Daughters shows the different stages in the mother and daughter relationship between various dyads. The chapters introduced are Chapter 1: Birth, Chapter 2: Growing Up, Chapter 3: Separation, Chapter 4: Woman to Woman, and lastly Chapter 5: Death and Renewal. The mother and daughter dyads were made of different race and cultures, such as,

The oldest generation had many hardships when they were in China, these are the grandmothers, but then the youngest generation are more American than Chinese. The middle generation are the mothers that spent some of their life in China, then moved to America for a better life. The Chinese mothers wanted their daughters to not lose sight of where they came from. The mothers were Suyuan who has a daughter named June, Lindo has a daughter named Waverly, AnMei who has a daughter named Rose, and Ying Yang who has a daughter named Lena. All of these mothers became friends through church, but June had to take her mother’s place in the group of friends because her mother died. The movie has many flashbacks of the mothers’ lives in China, because each mother had to teach her daughter of her worth. All of the mothers wanted their daughters to have a different life than them when they were in China. Suyuan had to leave her twin girls when there was war in China. Lindo’s mother married her off at fifteen. AnMei’s mother was raped and became a fourth wife because her family rejected her, then killed herself to give AnMei a stronger spirit. Ying Yang married an abusive man and killed her baby to get back at him, which she said “took her spirit.” All of these mothers tell their stories to convey how much hardships they went through and why they only want the best for their

The Story of Mothers and Daughters explores more of the birth and the growing up stages in the mother and daughter relationship. The mothers described how they felt when their children were born and the hopes of the relationship with their daughters. There were only mothers and daughters in The Story of Mothers and Daughters, unlike in The Joy Luck Club where there were grandmothers, mothers, and daughters. The Joy Luck Club was more of a story of flashbacks that had a moral lesson that the mothers taught their daughters, which was to know their worth. The daughters learned this lesson when they were older and needed to hear the importance of knowing their