The Misconceptions Between Both Generations

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A large abundance of relationships between mothers and daughters can all correlate to a certain time in their lives when they once misunderstood each other’s situations. A growing teenager may view her future and beliefs on life in an utterly different aspect compared to her mother’s perspective. On the other hand, a mother who has already experienced her youth’s hardships would want to guide their daughter’s future in order to prevent her from enduring those emotional complications. The Chinese mothers in The Joy Luck Club have struggles with emotional misunderstandings that leads to their failure in delivering their devoted affection to their daughters. Amy Tan thoroughly defines this issue with her characters in The Joy Luck Club. Through the context and analyzation of “Half and Half”, “Two Kinds”, and “Four Directions”, Amy explicitly develops the theme that mothers care more for their daughters than they realize.
While Rose believes that her mother doesn’t understand her convoluting situation, she later discovers that An-Mei affectionately loves her children and believes they can achieve anything that they put their minds into.The chapter, “Half and Half”, starts off with a brief background between Rose and Ted’s intricate divorce. As Rose assumes that An-Mei is still dubious about Rose’s problematic marriage, she believes that her mother still denies the fact that she is getting a divorce with the man she used to consider as her destined soul mate, even though she isn’t. Rose complains about her mother’s presumable repudiation of her annulment by saying, “When I tell her, I know she’s going to say, ‘This cannot be.’ And when I say that it is certainly true, that our marriage is over, I know what else she will say: ‘Then you...

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...ries of Rose, Jing-Mei, and Waverly, Amy Tan reveals the message that many mothers’ intentions that demonstrate affection aren’t fully recognized by their daughters. The mothers in this novel aim to teach their daughters the significance of comprehending the perception of nengkan or even guiding their lives in order to benefit their futures’ success. Perhaps there may be a message that Amy has exposed to all of us. Why should we care about our parents’ motives? What specific benefits would we gain as children? Once we do realize their amount of affection towards us, how exactly would it change our perspectives on life and our future? Could their intentions negatively impact us instead? We cannot ignorantly proceed to look only on one side of the picture. Instead, we have to consider both halves of the conception in order to fully grasp our elders’ primary intentions.

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