Use Of Figurative Language In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

In the novel, The Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan, uses figurative language to create an effect on the readers. Tan uses similes, metaphors, and symbolism, to add to the overall message of the relationships between mother and daughter and bond between them that has been inherited. However, Tan also uses language to show the connection between storytelling, memories, and inheritance.
Tan uses a simile to describe the resemblance in the circumstances that the four mothers and their daughter face. For example, “... she still came out the same way. Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was a girl. And i was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.”(Tan 215). Tan’s use of language in this quote, explains the connection between mother and daughter, and the stories told between them. Also, the mothers see their own mistakes and flaws in their daughters, and hope to prevent these daughters from suffering the same way they did.

For example, “And seeing the garden in this forgotten condition reminded me of something I once read in a fortune cookie: When a husband stops paying attention to the garden, he is thinking of pulling up roots”(Tan 194). The forgotten garden is being compared to Roses marriage and the letter that was sent to her by Ted with a pen, check, and a divorce document to sign. Also Roses observation of her dying garden that her husband once tended to, is a sign of her dying marriage with Ted, which is similar to her mother's observation of the plant her father got her and it dying even after she had faithfully watered it. However the title of the third part is "American Translation", resembling the reflection of what the daughters face in their American like life, compared to what the mother's, face in their heavily followed Asian