History, Culture and Identity of Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a novel that deals with many controversial issues. These issues unfold in her stories about four Chinese mothers and their American raised daughters. The novel begins with the mothers talking about their own childhood’s and the relationship that they had with their mothers. Then it focuses on the daughters and how they were raised, then to the daughters current lives, and finally back to the mothers who finish their stories. Tan uses these mother-daughter relationships to describe conflicts of history, culture, and identity and how each of these themes are intertwined with one another through the mothers and daughters.
The mothers and daughters not only experience a generation gap, but since the mothers were born in China and the daughters were born in America, they also experience a certain cultural gap. This leads to miscommunication and misunderstanding on both parts. To the mothers, their Chinese heritage is very meaningful to them and the Americanized daughters don’t always understand this. The daughters get embarrassed by their mothers’ broken English. For instance, at one point Lindo Jong says "But inside I am becoming ashamed. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother and she is not proud of me." (pg. 291). Lindo is hurt because her daughter Waverly, is talking to her like she is a child. Waverly does not do this on purpose, she just has a hard time understanding her mother and her background, like the other daughters in the book.
"Living with their traditional culture in American society, Chinese-American women suffer the prob...
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...ying to save their daughters from the cultural barriers, and identity crisis’ that they had to face. It is in listening to these stories that the daughters find their true identities and become the people that they really are. They realize that they do not have to look at their mothers’ as their opponents, but instead their equals. They accept and even honor the fact that they are the same as their mothers. The Joy Luck Club tells a strong and powerful story that shows the importance of history, culture, and identity in mother daughter relationships, and also in everyday life.
Works Cited
Do, Thuan Thi. Chinese-American Women in American Culture. 1992 http://www.ics.uci.edu/~tdo/ea/chinese.html
Jokinen, Anniina. Anniina's Amy Tan Page. 1996 http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/amytan/
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Random House, 1989.
Despite the fact that America’s economy was heavily influenced by government interference and favoritism under John Quincy Adams and the American System, by 1832 Andrew Jackson, the Champion of the Common Man, jeopardized his political security in the interest of both preserving every man’s right to opportunity and upholding a nonpartisan economy. We can draw insight from Jackson’s disgust for banks, or rather for any act of government that gives a special advantage to one group over another. In Jackson’s letter to Congress justifying his Bank Veto Message, he argues, “when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages... make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society… have a right to complain of the injustices of their government.” In the preceding months, Jackson was in the midst of his presidential campaign for reelection when his opponents put political pressure on him by fast tracking the Bank Bill. Jackson, however, remained steadfast in his belief that the proposed bank was unconstitutional and thus he vetoed the bill. Not surprisingly, Jackson became the object of political slander. In his reply to Jackson’s veto, Daniel Webster complains, “[This message] raises a cry that liberty is in danger, at the very moment when it puts forth claims to powers heretofore unknown and unheard of. It effects alarm for public freedom, when nothing endangers that freedom so much as its own unparalleled pretenses.” In other words, Webster proposed that through Jackson’s overuse of the veto, he was not only holding congress hostage, but also subverting democracy. On the contrary, the establishment of Jacksonian Democracy expanded the liberties of the common
In The Joy Luck Club, the novel traces the fate of the four mothers-Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair-and their four daughters-June Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. Through the experiences that these characters go through, they become women. The mothers all fled China in the 1940's and they all retain much of their heritage. Their heritage focuses on what is means to be a female, but more importantly what it means to be an Asian female.
Here is a journey that not only started "a thousand Li away", but from generations upon generations of tradition. The Joy Luck Club travels over time and continents to present the background and turmoil of eight amazing women. All of these women have had to deal with the issues of culture, gender, and family, each in their own way, yet all similarly. Amy Tan dedicates her novel to her mother with the comment "You asked me once what I would remember… This, and much more." Each of the mothers in Tan's novel wanted to teach their daughters the lessons learned in China while giving them the comforts of America. But language and culture barriers diverge the women until they were almost lost to each other. Each character had to take their own journey to finally understand what drove them apart and find their common ground.
The mother-daughter relationship is often complex and confusing. Amy Tan explores this relationship with novel The Joy Luck Club narrated by four daughters and three mothers: Jing-mei Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Lena St. Clair, Waverly Jong, An-mei Jordan, Ying-Ying St. Clair, and Lindo Jong. June narrates in her late mother's place. The mothers talk about their difficult pasts in China and how they have been changed. The trauma from their past causes their daughters not to be able to connect to . The women are finally able to connect to each other. The women are forced to learn from the past, overcome adversity, and learn to understand one another.
In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, four Chinese born mothers and their four American born daughters tell stories from their own point of view about their relationships with one another. These four mothers demonstrate the finest parenting by trying to keep their heritage alive and educate their daughters, while being immigrants. Through the mothers' actions, they are able to teach and influence their daughters about their Chinese heritage, about everyday life and situations, and how to stand up for themselves all while being in an overwhelming American society.
The Joy Luck Club is the telling of a tale of struggle by four mothers and their four daughters trying to understand the issue of gender identity, how they each discover or lose their sense of self and what they mean to one another. Throughout the book each of the mothers works hard at teaching their daughters the virtues of Chinese wisdom while allowing the opportunities of American life. They try passing on a piece of themselves despite the great barriers that are built between the women. Each of the stories gives a wonderful glimpse into the Chinese culture and heritage that the mothers are trying to reveal to their daughters through the use of festivals, food dishes, marriage ceremonies, and the raising of children, essentially their past experiences.
A stereotype is the grouping of all members of a certain common distinction into a set of standardized rules and aspects (Moore 36). Common areas people stereotype are race and gender; however, people also use sexual preferences, age, religion, and attractiveness as distinctions to group. The use of stereotypes is ethically wrong and not always correct. People use these judgments as a way to separate a...
Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships. The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had. In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture). They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life. These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3). To represent everything that was hoped for in their daughters, the mothers wanted them to have a “swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” (3). This swan was all of the mothers’ good intentions. However, when they got to America, the swan was taken away and all she had left was one feather.
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.
Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club describes the lives of first and second generation Chinese families, particularly mothers and daughters. Surprisingly The Joy Luck Club and, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts are very similar. They both talk of mothers and daughters in these books and try to find themselves culturally. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs.
One day everything is going great, in fact things could not be better and then you say something and your friend turns to you and says “oh my god, you sounded just like your mother”. That is when you freak out and think to yourself it is true I am turning into my mother. This is every daughters worst nightmare come true. When a young girl is growing up her mother always says and does things that the girl vows she will never say and do but she does. Very rarely do we see cases of women wanted to be like their mother but it usually happens even if they do not want it to. In the book The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan tells stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their relationships with the American born daughters. In this novel, Tan shows us the struggle these mothers face in teaching their American daughters about their heritage. Throughout the novel it becomes evident that the daughters feel it is important to learn about their history and develop stronger relationships with their mothers
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. The four daughters: Waverly, Lena, Rose, and Jing-Mei are all Americans. Even though they absorb some of the traditions of Chinese culture they are raised in America and American ideals and values. This inability to communicate and the clash between cultures create rifts between mothers and daughters.
The Joy Luck Club is a representation of the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between mother and daughter in a Chinese American society. The book illustrates the hardships both the mother and daughters go through in order to please the other. Also, it shows the troubles the daughters face when growing up in two cultures. This book reveals that most of the time mothers really do know best.
Neimen, Samantha, Brandon Robers, and Simon Robers. “Bullying: A State of Affairs.” Journal of Law & Education (n.d.):n. pag. Print.
Wiester, John L. 1993. The Real Meaning of Evolution. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 45 (3): 182-86.