The Joy Luck Club
The Joy luck club was a book written by Amy Tan. The story is set here in America and in China and is set in the 1940's and also takes place now. The book is about four Asian women who fled china and their Americanized daughters.
There are eight main characters four of which were mothers and four of which were daughters. They were Suyuan Woo, Ying-yang St. Clair, An-mei Hsu, and Lindo Jong, who were the mothers, and the daughters Jing-mei Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, Lena St. Clair. In the book it tells the story of each of the mothers and what they went through from the eyes of their daughters.
The book mostly focuses on Jing-mei Woo, who takes the place of her mother in the Joy Luck Club meetings after the death of her mother. In the meetings with the other mothers she reminisced about her mother and heard new stories about her mother she had never heard before. She hears stories of how it was her mother came to America and what she left behind in China.
The book starts off in China with a woman imagining what life in America raising a daughter would be like. Hoping that she would be an American but still have her Chinese heritage. But in the end her daughter turns out to be as Americanized as they come not realizing her Chinese heritage. This makes it so that they don't communicate very well and makes it so they don't know very much about each other.
This book shows that now days the traditions of the older generations are slowly being filtered out by the younger generations. An example in the book is when one of the mothers had her marriage pre-arranged by her parents and a friend of the family and the fact that she accepted the marriage.
The book is narrated by a little girl named Jook-Liang (or just Liang). You are introduced to her and her family who live in Vancouver B.C. during the Great Depression. She lives in a rundown house with her father; her real mom (who she's made to call Stepmother); the "old one", the children's grandmother-- Poh-Poh; and 3 brothers. The oldest Kiam; second oldest-- an orphan the family adopted Jung-Sum; and then would be Liang; and then the youngest child Sek-Lung (or Sekky).
Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club uses much characterization. Each character is portrayed in different yet similar ways. When she was raised, she would do whatever she could to please other people. She even “gave up her life for her parents promise” (49), I the story The Red Candle we get to see how Tan portrays Lindo Jong and how she is brought to life.
On a train in China, June feels that her mother was right: she is becoming Chinese, even though she never thought there was anything Chinese about her. June is going with her father to visit his aunt, who he hasn't seen since he was ten. Then, in Shanghai, June will meet her mother's other daughters. When a letter from them had finally come, Suyuan was already dead--a blood vessel had burst in her brain. At first, Lindo and the others wrote a letter telling the other sisters that Suyuan was coming. Then June convinced Lindo that this was cruel, so Lindo wrote another letter telling them Suyuan was dead. In the crowded streets of China, June feels like a foreigner. She is tall--her mother always told her that she might have gotten this from her mother's father, but they would never know, because everyone in the family was dead. Everyone died when a bomb fell during the war. Suddenly June's father's aunt comes out of the crowd. She recognizes him from a photograph he sent. June meets the rest of the family, having trouble remembering any words in Cantonese. They all go to a hotel, which June assumes must be very expensive but turns out to be cheap. The relatives are thrilled by how fancy it all is. They want to eat hamburgers in the hotel room. In the shower, June wonders how much of her mother stayed with those other daughters. Was she always thinking about them? Did she wish June was them? Later, June listens while her father talks with his aunt. He says that he never knew Suyuan was looking for her daughters her whole life. Her father tells her that her name, Jing-mei, means, "little sister, the essence of the others." June asks for the whole story of how her mother lost her other daughters. Her father tells her that though her mother hoped to trade her valuables for a ride to Chungking to meet her husband, no one was accepting rides. After walking for a long time, Suyuan realized she could not go on carrying the babies, so she left them by the side of the road and wrote a note, saying that if they were delivered to a certain address, the deliverer would be rewarded greatly. She got very sick with dysentery, and Canning met her in a hospital. She said to him, "Look at this face.
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.
The word happiness comes from the word happy, which means to feel or show pleasure or contentment. In the novel, “The Joy Luck Club”, two daughters of the mothers in Joy Luck Club begin to compete with each other. Waverly Jong, is a child chess prodigy. June Woo, struggles to master the piano. The rivalry reflects values of success and worth depicted in the novel, “The Joy Luck Club”. In this novel, happiness does not truly come from the word happy.
The movie, The Joy Luck Club, focuses around the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters. The story takes place a few months after Junes mother, Suyuan has died. The mothers and daughters hold very different principles, where the mothers are still very traditional to their Chinese upbringings the daughters are much more “American.” The movie can be viewed from the Feminist Literary Theory, since the 8 main characters are female. The women’s life stories are told through a series of flashback scenes that deal heavily with female gender roles and the expectations of women. While the mothers and their daughter grew up in vastly different worlds, some of their experiences and circumstances correlate solely due to that fact that they experienced them because they are females.
The Joy Luck Club, is a film that shows a powerful portrayal of four Chinese women and the lives of their children in America. The film presents the conflicting cultures between the United States and China, and how men treat women throughout their lives. People living in the United States usually take for granted their roles as a male or female. The culture of each country shapes the treatment one receives based on the sex of the individual. Gender roles shape this movie and allows people, specifically the United States, to see how gender are so crutcial in othe countries.
The book is organized into four sections, two devoted to the mothers and two devoted to the daughters, with the exception of June. The first section, logically, is about the mothers' childhoods in China, the period of time during which their personalities were molded, giving the reader a better sense of their "true" selves, since later in the book the daughters view their mothers in a different and unflattering light. Tan does this so the reader can see the stories behind both sides and so as not to judge either side unfairly. This section, titled Feathers From a Thousand Li Away, is aptly named, since it describes the heritage of the mothers in China, a legacy that they wished to bestow on their daughters, as the little story in the beginning signifies. For many years, the mothers did not tell their daughters their stories until they were sure that their wayward offspring would listen, and by then, it is almost too late to make them understand their heritage that their mothers left behind, long ago, when they left China.
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.
Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club In the Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan, focuses on mother-daughter relationships. She examines the lives of four women who emigrated from China, and the lives of four of their American-born daughters. The mothers: Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-Ying St. Clair had all experienced some life-changing horror before coming to America, and this has forever tainted their perspective on how they want their children raised.
Meanwhile, her mother suffered a serious illness. Tan resolved to take a trip to China with her mother if she recovered. In 1987, after Daisy Tan returned to health, they traveled to China to visit the three daughters that Daisy had not seen for several decades and the three sisters Tan had never met. The trip provided Tan with a new perspective on her mother, and it proved to be the key inspiration for her first book, The Joy Luck, a collection of sixteen...
... and in her hurry to get away, she (falls) before she even reach(s) the corner,” (87). This foreshadows the relationship between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club. The daughters can not understand the reasoning behind their mothers’ decisions. However, the mothers realize their daughters are so much like them and they do not want this to happen. The daughters grow up being “Americanized,” but as they grow older they begin to want to understand their Chinese culture. All of the characters learned many valuable lessons that will be passed on to their own children.
When analyzing the Joy Luck club it is important to consider the life of the author. It is apparent after studying both The Joy Luck Club and Amy Tan that there are some incredible similarities among the two, particularly the story of mother Suyuan-Woo and her daughter Jing-Mei Woo. Suyuan is a main character and plays an extremely important role in the novel even though she passed away. She created the Joy Luck club years ago and is the main reason why this tight kit family exists today. Suyuan decided to create the Joy Luck club during a ve...
Sadly, the characters revealed in The Joy Luck Club have personal histories so complicated by cultural and emotional misunderstandings that their lives are spent in failed attempts to cross the chasms created by these circumstances.
The story is told in the first-person narrative, or subjective point of view. This is important as it leads the reader to sympathize with the narrator as well as setting up the protagonist/antagonist relationship of daughter and mother. In this case, Jing Mei narrates as an adult but through the eyes of a child, allowing the reader to draw upon his/her ow...