Analysis: The Joy Luck Club

The relationship a mother has with her daughter is one of the most significant relationships either person will possess. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the stories of four mothers and their respective daughters are established through vignettes, which reveal the relationships between them. Throughout the novel, the mothers and daughters are revealed to be similar, yet different. Lindo and Waverly Jong can be compared and contrasted through their upbringings, marriages, and personalities.

All literature is created by themes, without themes, they would simply be stories, and within those themes are patterns; constantly repeating throughout the work. Throughout the novel, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, the use of themes and repeating patterns are seen through four different families. Some of the most prominent themes or patterns are family, specifically mother-daughter relationships, women and femininity, and growth in characters.

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.

In this passage from “Waiting between the Trees” from The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan illustrates how mothers sometimes lose the ability to keep their child safe due to lack of communication. As shown in the passage, the mother struggles to communicate her emotions and feelings to her daughter due to the chasm between them, meanwhile illustrating the repetition of regret of miscommunication.

Rose wants to tell her mother that she and Ted are going to get a divorce, but she knows that An-Mei will tell her that she must save the marriage.

Relationships define a connection between two beings, whether it be through blood, friendship, or romance. In most cases, the first group that people experience is with their families. The kinship people are born into comes with ups and downs, which may cause a rift between both parties. Thus, maintaining a seamless connection may become a struggle between two dissimilar individuals, “Like many relationships, we have our struggles, our misunderstandings, and our miscommunications. We are very different people, but also very similar at the same time” (Goreski). Amy Tan, an author of numerous novels, understands the battle of relationships, especially between culturally diverse mothers and daughters. In one of Tan’s novels, The Joy Luck Club, she writes to get the point across of how difficult it is for contrasting cultures to communicate with one another, “...out of an intense concern with the individual artistic choices she was making at every level and at every moment” (Evans 3). The passionate message Tan stresses in the novel demonstrate how crucial communication is to her, specifically between a mother and daughter.

“A relationship without trust is like a cellphone with no service, you just play games” (Quotesvalley). This quote shows that trust is important in a relationship, and it shows how without trust the people involved in the relationship will just be playing games, manipulating each other. The Joy Luck Club is about four Chinese mothers and their relationships with their daughters. The major influences that complicate these mother daughter relationships are differing opinions on cultural beliefs and a lack a trust between the mothers and daughters. Amy Tan shows the idea about trust's importance through the relationships in the Joy Luck Club through Waverly and Lindo Jong’s relationship, by showing that all relationships without trust will ultimately fail because this leads people to consistently think that others are trying to manipulate them.

When Jing-mei’s mother was living in Kweilin with her two baby girls, an army officer came to her house, telling her to go quickly to her husband in Chungking. Her friend bribed a man to steal a wheelbarrow and promised to warn her other friends that Kweilin was no longer safe. Suyuan packed all of her things into the wheelbarrow and began to push towards Chungking. When the wheel broke, she tied her babies across her body in scarves. She then took one bag of food and one bag of clothes in each hand. Soon, her hands began to bleed and she had to drop one bag after the other. By the time she reached Chungking, she had left everything behind, including the babies. She only had three silk dresses that she had worn one

In the tenth grade my English teacher gave my class an assignment: to write a narrative about a difficult relationship between two people living in a different culture. We were to complete this assignment after reading The Joy Luck Club, about the struggling relationships between mothers and daughters. I considered this a significant assignment, one where I would be required to create my own story, develop characters, and engage the reader. I have always loved creating stories in my head, so I was overall excited to complete the assignment.

A main theme in two novels in this class, Bliss Me Ultima and The Joy Luck Club, is family. Family is highlighted in both books. In Bliss Me Ultima, Antonio and other members is his family every year go help his mother’s extended family, The Lunas, tend to their lands. In The Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei fulfills her mother wish of reuniting with her twin sisters in China. Also in The Joy Luck Club, another narrator, Lena, acts as a translator for her mother to her father since they have a hard time understanding each other. In Bliss Me Ultima, Antonio’s family brings Ultima to come live with them, who had helped his parents during the hard times they faced. Antonio’s mother hold Ultima with high respect stating “we are honored that she comes to live with us, understand? (8). These novels have different family relationship in Bliss Me Ultima, Antonio believes in respecting member of family while in The Joy Luck Club the families have more of a strand relationship. Both novels, have a theme of family. Antonio’s family takes in Ultima as she grows older and do their best to protect her. While the families in The Joy Luck Club especially the mother daughter relationship know that even if they do not see things the exact same way that they have an important loyalty to each other.

Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club is a story of a monthly mah-jong gathering whose members consists of four Chinese mothers with American-born daughters. The novel is narrated by the four mothers and their daughters. At these meetings, the mothers share their concern of the growing rift between their daughters and Chinese customs. Each mother shares her story of her life in China and each daughter tells her story about her life in America. In The Joy Luck Club, the consistent conflict is formulated from the cultural and ideological clash between the mothers and daughters. Tensions arise out of the struggle to adapt to the American way of life when old customs are expected to be honored.

One idea that is explored thoroughly in the novel the Joy Luck Club is the effect that conflicting values can have on an immigrant family, which is a part of a larger theme in the novel, which is immigration. Conflicting values happen when a first-generation immigrant parent’s upbringing in their native country and the values imparted thereof conflict with the upbringing of their children in the country that they immigrated to and the values that they learn from life in their new country.This can cause a disconnect between the child and their native culture and can lead to a disconnect between the child and their parents.

Mother’s Love Moving from hometown to another city is always hard for people, imagine moving to a whole new country, where people speak a different language, different culture and different lifestyle, it will take us years to blend in the new environment, some people won’t blend in forever. In the novel The Joy Luck Club generation gap is a big problem between four mothers and daughters. The author Amy Tan herself is a first generation Chinese American, she was born in Oakland, California, her parents emigrated from China to America two years before she was born. She moved to Santa Clara after spending much of her childhood in the bay area. Sadly Tan

The Joy Luck Club Was written by 1989 by Amy Tan, a first generation American born in 1952 to immigrant parents. Tan was raised by her mother, who had left kids back in China, and a father, who was a Baptist minister. She grew up in California and attended high school in Switzerland. At the age of 15 her brother and father died of a brain tumor. Tan perceives the American dream in the way that an Asian immigrant would, which would be to pass down what we know so our kids won’t repeat the same mistake and will apply it to their lives.

This movie depicted different life experience of four pairs of Chinese mother and daughter. Though distinct grievous life stories they had, these four Chinese mothers were all born and bred under the background of feudal Chinese regime, cultivated by Chinese traditional feudalism, and fatefully, their lives were poisoned and destroyed by malignant tumor of Chinese backward culture and ideology, for example, women are subordinated to men. More unfortunately, the four daughters who were born and educated in America, assumed to avoid from the influence of Chinese feudal culture, still inherited deformed character, like without self-value and spirit; extended last generation’s tragedy—misery marriage. The