The Everlasting Bond between a Mother and a Daughter

Nothing is more enduring than a mother- daughter relationship. This bond is specifically explored in the books, The Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother by Amy Chua and The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Authors of these books precisely show the complexity of this type of relationship. Chua and Tan show the reader how a mother and daughter can hurt one other but ultimately forgiveness finds its way through. The similarities in these books include the difficulty of communication between the mother and daughter and their sacrifices for love. The difference between these books is the mothers’ outlooks of the role women play in society.

The Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother and The Joy Luck Club both demonstrate the barriers that exist between the mothers and the daughters of the Chinese culture. These barriers are often caused by the inability to communicate with each other. In both books, the daughters believed that they could never make their mothers proud. In The Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother, the mother, Amy Chua, was never satisfied with Lulu’s or Sophia’s roles with their instruments. These two daughters believed that their mother was out to get them when in fact Chua had high hopes and pure intentions for them to become successes and prodigies. Chua never believed that there was a task that her daughters couldn’t conquer. She made Lulu practice this very intense piano piece and for a long time Lulu was stumbling over it. It came to a point where the father, Jed, pleaded for Chua to let Lulu take a break. This went against Chua’s beliefs and as a result, Lulu was not allowed to give up. Later that night, Lulu had mastered the piano piece and was thankful that she was pushed as hard as she was by her mother. Lulu’s success over this piece did ...

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...control over anything while the other believes that women are equal to men.

Both books center on mother and daughter conflict. Mothers are continuously shown to have high hopes for their daughters in these books. Though their daughters fail many times, a lesson is learned from each experience. The daughters are noted to feel equivalent to a failure in their mothers’ eyes, but this is only due to the lack of communication between them. In The Joy Luck Club, generational roles that women play help establish the pattern of relationships between a mother and a daughter. To explain the relationship, this book is divided into mother stories in the first two halves and daughter stories in the last two halves while Amy Chua models her book in chronological order of occurrences. In the end of it all, mothers and daughters learn to accept each other for what they are.