Family Relations in The Joy Luck Club
One passage, from the novel The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan, reveals the complex relations and emotions that are involved in families. This passage concerns the story of four Chinese women and their daughters. The author leads the reader through the experiences of the mothers as they left China and came to America. The daughters have been raised in America, as Americans. This is what the mothers had wanted although it also causes them great distress. This is illustrated in the passage I have chosen.
“My daughter wanted to go to China for her second honeymoon, but now she is afraid.
“What if I blend in so well they think I’m one of them?” Waverly asked me. “What if they don’t let me come back to the United States?”
“When you go to China,” I told her, “you don’t even need to open your mouth. They already know you are an outsider.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. My daughter likes to speak back. She likes to question what I say.
“Aii-ya”, I said. “Even if you put on their clothes, even if you take off your makeup and hide your fancy jewelry, they know. They know just watching the way you walk, the way you carry your face. They know you do not belong.”
My daughter did not look pleased when I told her this, that she didn’t look Chinese. She had a sour American look on her face. Oh, maybe ten years ago, she would have clapped her hands - hurray! - as if this were good news. But now she wants to be Chinese, it is so fashionable. And I know it is too late. All those years I tried to teach her! She followed my Chinese ways only until she learned how to walk out the door by herself and go to school. So now the only Chinese ...
... middle of paper ...
...mes, for all members, but it is also a support network that can be beneficial for everyone. I think that as the daughters got older they realized more and more how important family is, even though it can be a source of frustration at times.
Works Cited and Consulted
Feng, Pin-chia. "Amy Tan." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 173: American Novelists since World War II. Fifth Series.
Gale Reseach, 1996: 281 -289.
Heung, Marina. "Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club." Feminist Studies. Fall 1993: 597 - 613.
Schell, Orville. "Your Mother is in Your Bones." The New York Times Book Review. 19 March 1989: 3,28.
Seaman, Donna, Amy Tan. "The Booklist Interview: Amy Tan."' Booklist. I October 19%.: 256,257.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Vintage Contemporaries. New York: A Division of Random House, Inc., 1991.
Here is a journey that not only started "a thousand Li away", but from generations upon generations of tradition. The Joy Luck Club travels over time and continents to present the background and turmoil of eight amazing women. All of these women have had to deal with the issues of culture, gender, and family, each in their own way, yet all similarly. Amy Tan dedicates her novel to her mother with the comment "You asked me once what I would remember… This, and much more." Each of the mothers in Tan's novel wanted to teach their daughters the lessons learned in China while giving them the comforts of America. But language and culture barriers diverge the women until they were almost lost to each other. Each character had to take their own journey to finally understand what drove them apart and find their common ground.
The mother-daughter relationship is often complex and confusing. Amy Tan explores this relationship with novel The Joy Luck Club narrated by four daughters and three mothers: Jing-mei Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Lena St. Clair, Waverly Jong, An-mei Jordan, Ying-Ying St. Clair, and Lindo Jong. June narrates in her late mother's place. The mothers talk about their difficult pasts in China and how they have been changed. The trauma from their past causes their daughters not to be able to connect to . The women are finally able to connect to each other. The women are forced to learn from the past, overcome adversity, and learn to understand one another.
In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, four Chinese born mothers and their four American born daughters tell stories from their own point of view about their relationships with one another. These four mothers demonstrate the finest parenting by trying to keep their heritage alive and educate their daughters, while being immigrants. Through the mothers' actions, they are able to teach and influence their daughters about their Chinese heritage, about everyday life and situations, and how to stand up for themselves all while being in an overwhelming American society.
Durkheim is called one of the two principal founders of the modern phase of sociological Theory. He is stablished that brought him work for the analysis of social systems. The framework Remain the central to Sociology, a few related anthropologies. Durkheim was born in the town of Epinal. He was of Jewish percentage, some of his friends were rabbis. He was expected to be a rabbi but he became an agnostic. In 1886, there have took a year leave to study in Germany, where he was impressed by the psychologist Wundt. The ham was concerned with how societies could maintain the integrity and coherence in modern society.
As the four women entered America, which is far from their motherland China, they experience a change of culture, the American culture, which was dominant than the Chinese. The Chinese mothers are faced with a difficult task of how to raise their American-born daughters with an understanding of their heritage. The daughters clearly show a gap in culture between the Chinese culture and American culture. The mothers wanted their daughter to follow the Chinese traditions, but the daughters followed the American traditions and even some of them got married to American men. The mothers tried to tell their daughters the story about the Chinese ancestors but the daughter could not follow them and the daughters thought their mothers were backwards and did not know what they are saying. As much as the mothers tried to show love to their daughters, the daughters usually responded negatively. They often saw their mothers’ attempts to guidance as a failure to understand the American culture. Being Chinese and living in America, both the mothers and the daughters struggle with many issues like identity, language, translation, and others. The mothers try to reconcile their Chinese pasts with their American presents; the daughters try to find a balance between independence and loyalty to their heritage
As the concept of traditional female is significant in Elizabethan society, Lady Macbeth is rather contradictory as she is ambitious and takes control to persuade Macbeth. To begin, when Lady Macbeth receives Macbeth’s letter with the witches appearance and the prophesies, she realizes that her husband is weak-willed and plans to persuade him to remove any obstacles. Worth mentioning is that not only she takes control of the situation but she spurs Macbeth into murdering Duncan by saying “…When you durst do it, then you were a man” (1.7.49). She acts out of her role as she insults his manliness and declares that she would have “dash’d the brains out” (1.7.58) her child while it was feeding at her breast. This reveals her unwomanly characteristics as Lady Macbeth do not care for her children. At the same time, Lady Macbeth overrides the source of evil as she believes in witchcraft and calls for evil spirits for help. She state...
At the beginning of the play, Macbeth is a trusted soldier, who is honest and noble. Unfortunately, he meets three witches who tell him three prophecies; that he will become thane of Cawdor, that he will become king and that Banquo’s sons will become kings. These three prophecies slowly change his opinions on life and turn him into a greedy, dishonest, tyrant, full of ambition. Lady Macbeth’s thoughts change as well when she is told about the three prophecies that were told to Macbeth. In the beginning of the play, Lady Macbeth is ambitious, controlling and domineering. She is the one who encourages him to kill the king, she not only encourages him, she makes all the plans herself, which shows her determination and persistence."Yet I do fear thy nature, it is too full o’th milk of human kindness. To catch the nearest way thou wouldst be great. Art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it." (Act 1, scene 5). Lady Macbeth is the force behind Macbeth’s sudden ambition and she tries to manipulate him into feeling guilty and unmanly for not following through with the murder, by using her husbands emotions, she manages to convince Macbeth to murder Duncan.
He begins as a fierce Scottish warrior. But his greed, his lust for power, is what drags him down. His judgment is clouded, he can only see ideas that will help him obtain what he wants. Lady Macbeth starts off as the dominating person in their relationship. Such as that she can get manipulate him to do anything for her desires as long as she does it in various ways, like playing on his confidence. However, as the play progresses, and Duncan is killed, Macbeth seems to become the dominating partner swapping positions. Both of them have ambition, Lady Macbeth's ambition drives her to manipulate Macbeth into the most malevolent crime of regicide. But Macbeth’s ambition becomes unstable. Macbeth kills for the first time he has not choice but to conceal his wicked actions, and to have done this again because he is scared, of getting caught and having to repent of his crimes and could mean that his hunger for power became an obsessive trait, never satisfied with his current status."vaulting ambition, which o'erleap”In the end he became a tyrant condemned by his own people leading him to his death. Macbeth's view of reality became twisted. He saw things in a way that only went his way. This distorted his judgment which lead him to make the wrong decisions. Through Macbeth's constant need to fulfil his ambition he became very involved with himself. The wrong decisions that he made resulted in his tragic demise. These traits developed throughout the play with no control over his ambition, unfortunately leading to his
Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships. The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had. In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture). They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life. These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3). To represent everything that was hoped for in their daughters, the mothers wanted them to have a “swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” (3). This swan was all of the mothers’ good intentions. However, when they got to America, the swan was taken away and all she had left was one feather.
Lady Macbeth takes the role of the dominant partner in the beginning of the play, by acting as the real power behind the throne. For example, it is easily recognized that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are opposite in many ways (Scott 236). He is weak, indecisive, and takes on the traditional female role of the marriage; she is strong, decisive, and takes on the traditional male role. One place in the play where Macbeth’s character is shown is Act I, Scene 5, Lines 15-17. She says, “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be / What thou art promis’d : yet do I fear thy nature / Is too full o’ the milk of human kindness.” This is just after Lady Macbeth receives the letter from Macbeth. It is also important to notice that when Macbeth’s first thoughts of killing Duncan appear, he is scared. After he commits the murder, Macbeth says, “To know my deed, ‘twere best not know myself ” ( 2. 2. 72 ). Knowing that he has committed such a vile act makes him uncomfortable. It will be difficult to act innocent and deal with his guilt.
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.
One day everything is going great, in fact things could not be better and then you say something and your friend turns to you and says “oh my god, you sounded just like your mother”. That is when you freak out and think to yourself it is true I am turning into my mother. This is every daughters worst nightmare come true. When a young girl is growing up her mother always says and does things that the girl vows she will never say and do but she does. Very rarely do we see cases of women wanted to be like their mother but it usually happens even if they do not want it to. In the book The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan tells stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their relationships with the American born daughters. In this novel, Tan shows us the struggle these mothers face in teaching their American daughters about their heritage. Throughout the novel it becomes evident that the daughters feel it is important to learn about their history and develop stronger relationships with their mothers
Lady Macbeth’s relationship with her husband is not as patriarchal as is seen in traditional representations of husband and wife dynamics during this time period. For example, she says, “To alter favor ever is to fear/ Leave all the rest to me” to Macbeth (I.v.72-73). She tells him what to do and how to do it rather than the more accustomed reverse. She is also taking a position of authority by doing things for herself. Lady Macbeth criticizes her husband, saying, “Wouldst thou have that/ Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life/ And live a coward in thine own esteem?” (I.vii.41-43). She calls him a coward, easily insulting him without repercussions and with the knowledge that he won’t do anything because of it. After Macbeth kills Duncan and is in shock of the crime he has just committed, Lady Macbeth says, “Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead/ Are but as pictures. ‘Tis the eye of childhood/ That fears a painted devil” (II.ii.53-55). In this scene, she is taking charge of the situation by ignoring her husband’s inability to fully comprehend what he has just don...
The Joy Luck Club is a representation of the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between mother and daughter in a Chinese American society. The book illustrates the hardships both the mother and daughters go through in order to please the other. Also, it shows the troubles the daughters face when growing up in two cultures. This book reveals that most of the time mothers really do know best.
In life, many things can be taken for granted - especially the things that mean the most to you. You just might not realize it until you've lost it all. As I walk down the road finishing up my teenage days, I slowly have been finding a better understanding of my mother. The kind of bond that mothers and daughters have is beyond hard to describe. It's probably the biggest rollercoaster ride of emotions that I'll ever have the chance to live through in my lifetime. But, for those of us who are lucky enough to survive the ride in one piece, it's an amazing learning experience that will influence your entire future.