Amy Tan 's The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is the first novel by Amy Tan, published in 1989. The Joy Luck Club is about a group of Chinese women that share family stories while they play Mahjong. When the founder of the club, Suyuan Woo, died, her daughter June replaced her place in the meetings. In her first meeting, she finds out that her lost twin sisters were alive in China. Before the death of Suyuan, the other members of the club located the address of June’s half-sisters. After that, they send June to tell her half-sisters about her mother’s life. In our lives there are events, and situations that mark our existence and somehow determine our life. In this novel, it shows how four mothers and their daughters were impacted by their tradition and beliefs. In the traditional Asian family, parents define the law and the children are expected to follow their requests and demands; respect for one’s parents and elders is critically important. Traditions are very important because they allow us to remember the beliefs that marked a whole culture.

First of all, the Joy Luck Club had so many conflicts and misunderstandings between almost all of the characters. Most of the conflicts were between Waverly and her mom. Some conflicts were just differences between Waverly and her mother because of the generation gap between the two. Her mom didn’t like the things she would do and she could never see herself doing things that Waverly was doing back when she was a child. There were also cultural and martial conflicts throughout the book also.

Amy Tan had many personal experiences in her story. For example, when Amy Tan was living in Northern California, her mother had very high expectations on her. Her mother wanted her to be with the American society and be the best she could be. Amy Tan had to get a haircut very short to the way other famous children were acting in the United States. Amy’s mother was the one who encouraged this. With that, in the story “Two Kinds,” the young girl named Jing-mei live in a part of California and she had to get a very short haircut. Jing-mei’s mother wanted her daughter to look and act the same way Shirley Temple did. Within both of the girls lives, they each had to act like an already famous person exactly to please their mothers.

“Four Directions” is the story of Waverly Jong, the young prodigy chess player who lashes out at her mother because of her constant showing off of Waverly. After returning to chess, Waverly realizes that her skill and determination is gone, along with the support and love from her mother. She beings to understand that her winning was solely dependant on her mother’s boastful remarks about her daughter, the love the Lindo was so openly expressing.

Waverly Jong is very different from her mother, Lindo, but Waverly shares some similarities with her mother. Both women know how to be tricky towards their situations. When married to Tyan-yu in China, Lindo devised a plan to exit the marriage without dishonoring her family. Lindo said, “It was really quite simple. I made the Huangs think it was their idea to get rid of me, that they would be the ones to say the contract was valid.” (Tan, “Joy Luck Club” 63). Lindo later stated, “They didn’t blame me so much. Huang Taitai got her grandson. I got my clothes, a rail ticket to Peking, and enough money to go to America.” (Tan, “Joy Luck Club” 66). Lindo Jong uses her deceitfulness to get herself out of the marriage, while Waverly Jong uses her deceitfulness to trick her opponents in chess. When going against one of her opponents, she described it as the challenger disappearing, “the color ran out of the room, and I saw only my white pieces and his black ones waiting on the other sides. A light wind began blowing past my ears. It whispered secrets only I could hear.…”Check,” I said, as the wind roared with laughter.” (Tan, “Joy Luck Club, 96 and 97). When reading these examples, both mother and daughter show a correlation with this craftiness in certain situations. Although, Lindo and Waverly have their differences. Lindo Jong has a very strong sense of self during situations. Before Lindo’s marriage, she was questioning who she was. She then gains control over herself and tells

“Here is how I came to love my mother.  How I saw her my own true nature.  What was beneath my skin.  Inside my bones.” (Tan 40)

Waverly was going to tell Lindo of her and Rich’s engagement, but whenever she mentioned him, Lindo cut her off and began to talk about something else. Waverly was convinced that her mother did not have any good intentions, and that she never saw good in people. Due to this, she was afraid of what her mother will say when she would meet Rich. According to Waverly, she and Rich shared a “pure love”, which she was afraid her mother would poison. Waverly planned to go to Auntie Suyuan’s house with Rich for dinner, knowing that her mother would then invite the two over for dinner to her house, and this would give her mother a chance to get to know and warm up to Rich. However, when they went for dinner, Rich did everything incorrectly- he didn’t understand Chinese customs and made several mistakes that were seen as

Culture defines humanity. Culture makes humans different than any other living organism ever known. Culture is what makes humans unique, and yet culture is easily the most misunderstood characteristic of individuals. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan develops the theme of incomplete cultural understanding leads to an inability to communicate one’s true intentions through juxtaposition and conflict between mothers and daughters and their cultures.

In the novel The Joy Luck Club written by Amy Tan, there are several stories that intertwine into one novel. Each of the stories takes place China where the roles and the actions of woman are vastly different compared to American tradition. In the different stories, they all are about different mothers and daughters. Throughout the book, the reader can see the development in each relationship between mother and daughter with their conflicting backgrounds from China to America.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan follows multiple Chinese-American women who struggle with their self-identity and creating a balance between American and Chinese culture. Because of their immigration and many hardships in life, many of the women feel like they cannot truly tell who they are anymore, and throughout the novel these women are portrayed as ghosts. Ghosts are used to symbolize these women because they share many parallels including being only a remnant of who they once were, or who they could be. Ying-ying St. Clair is one of the women, who has a daughter named Lena St. Clair, she has had a troubled past in China, which has made her lose her fighting spirit, and her spirit in general. Ying-ying is fully aware of her loss of spirit and is embarrassed because she considers ghosts to be shameful and weak, and wants to save her daughter, Lena, from her fate.

I think to myself what if I had a fight with my mother? What if, the fight, I was in trouble? What would I do? After the chapter “ Rules of the Game ”, I think that I have a good idea on what Waverly will do next.

The Joy Luck Club revolves around the idea of family; specifically focusing on mother-daughter relationships. Each mother-daughter pair faces their own struggles such as overly high expectations, miscommunication, and the passing on of undesirable traits. In the first story of this novel Suyuan Woo, the mother of Jing-mei Woo, wants her daughter to become a piano prodigy. She ends up putting such high expectations on Jing-mei that she refuses to practice correctly and become good. Since her mother set such high expectations for her daughter, her daughter begins to resent her. These expectations caused Jing-mei to feel as if she was never good enough for her mother and as a result, their relationship is weakened. Different from Suyuan and Jing-mei are Lindo and Waverly. All of Waverly’s life she feels as if her mother is always against her and is constantly pointing out the negatives in everything. She blames her mother for the failure of her first marriage because she pointed out everything wrong with her husband. Waverly says,

The American voice is the capability to renovate and challenge stereotypes of America through copious amounts of literature. The American voice is incredibly unparalleled because of the tremendous sacrifices, tragedies, and challenges authors have endured and conquered. The events that are formative to the American voice are the differences and uniqueness between America and other foreign countries. The people that formulate the American voice are American writers that express their thoughts, feelings, and decisions through poems, short stories, and novels. The American voice was formed by the diversity of people and the struggles they overcame; therefore, hope and loss are common themes throughout the creation of the

The purpose of this paper is to investigate pluralism, acculturation and assimilation in Amy Tan 's novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), a finalist for the National Award, and a recipient of the 1990 Bay Area Book Reviewers award for fiction. Amy Tan (1952- ) is a Chinese American novelist; she is the daughter of John Tan, a Chinese electrical engineer, and Daisy Tan, who immigrated to the United States a few years before Amy Tan 's birth. In The Joy Luck Club, Tan skillfully explores the Chinese experience in the United States through two

In the movie, the Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, we see many examples of the challenges of intercultural translations. The movie portrays cultural conflict between Chinese culture and the American culture as portrayed by the lives of four mothers and their daughters. The mothers were born and raised in China, adopting the high-content Chinese culture, while their daughters, born and raised in America, adopted the low-context American