The Joy Luck Club Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey consists of three main parts that each hero must trek through in order to complete their quest. The departure or call to adventure, the hero’s fulfillment which includes the trials and transformations that he or she will go through and the hero’s return. Through these stages heroes find themselves and accomplish things they may have never believed were possible. The Joy Luck Club follows the lives of four women and the things they had to overcome while in China and later in America with their daughters. In The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tam each woman goes through their own journey, some embarking on a journey more heroic than others. Each of the women had their own difficulties during their lives in China and then

The candle burning completely was a seal, it would make her marriage with Tyan-yu permanent and it was the biggest obstacle in her way at the time. Every hero faces tough conflicts at one point in their journey and the candle was Lindo’s. “But I was hoping-I was praying to Buddha, the goddess of mercy, and the full moon-to make that candle go out...My throat filled up with so much hope that it finally burst and blew out my husband’s end of the candle” (Tam 60). She wanted so much for the candle to go out and it did, although this resolved her internal conflict it did not resolve the problem of her marriage. The next morning the matchmaker still declared that the candle had burned completely and Lindo’s journey was still not over. Another test she continually had to face was the fact that Huang Taitai wanted a grandson, but Tyan-yu did not plant any seeds in Lindo and Lindo did not want to become pregnant with his child. “..She confined me to the bed so that her grandchildren’s seeds would not spill out so easily” (Tam 62). Haung Taitai began to try all kinds of different things so that Lindo would become pregnant, but nothing

“I made the Huangs think it was their idea to get rid of me, that they would be the ones to say the marriage contract was not valid” (Tam 63). Lindo came up with the clever plan to say it was the ancestors who did not approve of their marriage and that their marriage was cursed. This was the last big obstacle that Lindo would have to face with the Huangs. She gave them three signs that were supposedly given to her from their ancestors and they believed her. In the end Tyan-yu ended up marrying the servant girl that had fed Lindo and Huang Taitai was happy with a grandson. “The Huangs asked only that I never tell anybody of any importance about the story of my doomed marriage” (Tam 66). In exchange for her freedom, Lindo had to keep the cursed marriage a secret. To end her journey Lindo also got things that would help her wrap up her hero’s journey, “I got my clothes, a rail ticket to Peking, and enough money to go to America” (Tam 66). Not only did she receive her freedom and keep her free will, but she also had enough to begin a new life in America as a person who was changed for the better. Her new beginning is a whole other adventure that she got to have, but for that experience she had the experience of her hero’s journey under her