An Mei Essay

In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the author chooses to primarily focus her novel on the miscommunications between traditional Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters via the use vignettes from almost every character. Throughout the novel, Tan writes about several characters that have made a hero’s journey according to Joseph Campbell. Campbell states that a hero’s journey includes: a departure, how a hero sets off onto their journey, a fulfillment, their goal that is being accomplished, and a return, how the character impacts others in the story. This blueprint for a hero was executed by Jing-mei Woo. In the novel, Jing-mei Woo faces the death of her mother which, in turn, plunges her into her own heroic journey according to Joseph

Many women find that their mothers have the greatest influence on their lives and the way their strengths and weaknesses come together. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters are followed through vignettes about their upbringings and interactions. One of the mothers, An-Mei Hsu, grows up away from her mother who has become the 4th wife of a rich man; An-Mei is forced to live with her grandmother once her mother is banned from the house, but eventually reunites and goes to live in the man’s house with her mother. Her daughter, Rose, has married an American man, Ted, but their marriage begins to end as he files for divorce; Rose becomes depressed and unsure what to do, despite

The members of The Joy Luck Club are four elderly ‘aunties’ who gather once a week in San Francisco to play Mah-jong and eat Chinese food. When one of the women dies, her daughter Jing-mei (June) is invited to take her place. “What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything. She was my mother.’’ (Tan 1998, 30) When she realizes that she knows very little about her own mother she asks the ‘aunties’ to tell her more about her. That is when they start telling each other stories.

Mostly, Jing-mei 's fears echo those of her peers, the other daughters of the Joy Luck Club members. They have always identified with Americans (Jing-mei also goes by the English name"June") but are beginning to regret having not paid attention to their Chinese history. Her fears also speak to a two-way fear shared by the mothers, who wonder whether, by giving their daughters American opportunities and (the ability to survive with no outside help), they have abandoned them from their Chinese history.

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

Rose is unable to fully accept herself or the statements made by her mother throughout the chapter, until she reflects back on her relationship and realizes how her mother predicted this by the condition of the garden taken care of by her husband. She understands her mother finally and stands up to Ted, explaining to him how she was going to fight for everything in the divorce.

 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

Communication between generations has always been an issue and with that, a misunderstanding of the past and culture comes along. In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, she shows the stories of four Chinese mothers and their American born daughters. Throughout the novel, the characters encounter both external and internal conflicts in order to contrast the different relationships held by the mothers and daughters with their past and where they came from. The mother-daughter pair of Lindo and Waverly Jong shows the gap between the generations very clearly. Everything is different, from language to name to marriage.

The book The Joy Luck Club is a novel written by Amy Tan, who is very famous in writing about mother-daughter relationships. There are four pairs of mothers and daughters whose stories are told in The Joy Luck Club. All of the mothers were born in China and came to America because of some kind of problem, but their daughters were born in the United States. Due to the fact that the daughters were born in the United States, they are extremely Americanized. Consequently, they do not value the Chinese heritage which their mothers valued dearly. As the daughters are growing up, this conflict between them increases. Suyuan Woo and her daughter, June or Jing-mei, two characters from the book, had major conflicts over the Chinese belief system of

    The commonly known phrase “like mother, like daughter” holds very true with all the pairs of mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club.  Rose posses important characteristics that were passed on by her mother, An-mei.  Uniquely with this couple, the trait can also be traced back to An-mei’s mother.  All three of these women have difficulty

In The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Jing-Mei and her mother have a very rocky relationship. Tan develops a relationship between Suyuan and Jing-Mei that is distant in the beginning due to culture differences and miscommunication, but gradually strengthens with time and understanding. Both of them have different backgrounds and have been influenced by two different cultures. Suyuan grew up in China and behaves according to the Chinese culture and her American-born daughter Jing-Mei is influenced by the American culture that surrounds her and wants to become part of it.  Their relationship is also shaped by the pressure Suyuan puts on Jing-Mei. She wants her to be a perfect

An-mei and Rose have similar character development in that Rose’s character development aided her relationship with An-mei. In “Scar” and “Magpies,” An-mei reveals how she was taught to desire nothing and swallow her tears. Because of her experience with a deceptive, multi-wife household and her mother’s suicide, An-mei taught Rose the opposite of this Chinese way. However, An-mei realizes that Rose came out the same way regardless of her teachings (page 215). An-mei tells Rose that Rose was born without wood and would bend to listen to other people if she was not careful (page 191). Rose grows up believing everything her mother says and is prone to nightmares led by Mr. Chou. In Rose’s failed marriage, she does not make any decisions and just lets things happen. Rose finally takes a look at

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,

Each daughter in The Joy Luck Club experiences these same feelings. In the midst of her divorce, Rose Hsu Jordan does not ever speak up for herself. Her mother, An-mei, learned the importance of speaking up for herself. An-mei learned this lesson after her mother’s death because, “on that day (An-mei) learned to shout” (Tan 240). An-mei tries to get Rose, who is struggling with her marriage, to understand this lesson, but each of her attempts are brushed aside. Rose believes that her mother’s attempts to teach her to speak up for herself are instead an attempt to get Rose

This anecdote sets the stage for conflict between the Chinese mothers and their American daughters. The issue of the language barrier is a constant theme in both The Joy Luck Club and The Woman Warrior. In the immigrant narrative, English plays a major role in assimilating into the new world. For Tan, the struggle between Chinese and English haunts both her real life and her fiction. Tan herself stopped speaking Chinese at age five, though she has never lost her first language entirely (Amy). Her mother, Daisy, however, speaks "in a combination [...] of English and Mandarin" (Huntley 3). Tan was taunted in grade school for her mother's heavy Shanghai accent (Huntley 3). Because Daisy never became fluent in English, the linguistic friction merely escalated between the two women (Amy). Tan expresses this tension in her novel when the fictional Jing-mei admits that she has trouble understanding her mother's meaning, and empathizes with her aunties who "see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English" (Tan 40-1). The stresses of a bilingual relationship are further explored when Lena St. Clair finds herself acting as translator between her Chinese mother and English-Irish father, who each refuse to learn the other's language, placing their daughter in the cultural crossfire (Tan