Family In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan's first novel. It consists of four sections with sixteen short stories. One of the main issues of the novel is the relationship between Chinese mothers and their Chinese – American daughters. ‘‘Your mother is in your bones.’’ (Tan 1998, 30) There is a cultural chasm between them because of the difference in the way they were brought up and different influences of the environment.

The mother-daughter relationships represented in Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club are influenced by many existing factors. Lena St. Clair, Ying-Ying St. Clair’s daughter, is a Chinese-American adult who lives with her forceful husband, Harold. Ying-Ying is a Chinese mother who travelled to America to live a better life after experiencing many hardships in China. Throughout the novel, the relationship between Lena and Ying-Ying is represented as weak and distant. These characters are prevented from having a healthy relationship because they do not support each other, they possess similar characteristics, and they are strong.

 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

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 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

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 centers around eight individual women who are all of Chinese decent. Four of the women are mothers and the latter four are each individual woman’s child. The mothers are immigrates and the daughter are first generation American Citizens. All four of the mothers

    Of the many stories involving the many characters of "The Joy Luck Club", I believe the central theme connecting them all is the inability of the mothers and their daughters to communicate effectively.

Amy Tan was born in China on February 19, 1952. She was one of three children to her parents. Amy was born to her mother’s second husband. Later on, her family escaped China on the last boat before the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Her mother left behind three other kids from a previous marriage. Amy finished high school in Switzerland, and fought with her mom the whole time. She went to college at a Baptist college. She then defied her mother by leaving that college and following her boyfriend to San Jose State University. She further defied her mother by abandoning her pre-medical degree for an English and linguistics major. She eventually married her boyfriend, Louis DeMattei, and they moved to San Francisco. Amy Tan started to repair her relationship with her mother, once she was deathly ill and in the hospital. Amy made a promise to take her mom to China to find the children that she left behind. This allowed for Amy to finish her book and get closer to her mother. She went on to write many books and essays after her time with her mother. What caused that dramatic of a change in major for Amy? What caused the rift between her and her mother?

The Joy Luck Club is a novel known as the novel of stories within stories. This is because of how it is structured,Amy Tan writes about sixteen different interwoven stories about Chinese immigrant mothers and their relationships with their American born daughters. Amy Tan creates four different sections each of which contain four different narratives. In the first section the mother's recall their own relationships with their mothers back in china. The next section the

Traditions, heritage and culture are three of the most important aspects of Chinese culture. Passed down from mother to daughter, these traditions are expected to carry on for years to come. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, daughters Waverly, Lena, Rose and June thoughts about their culture are congested by Americanization while on their quests towards self-actualization. Each daughter struggles to find balance between Chinese heritage and American values through marriage and professional careers.

The novel, The Joy Luck Club describes the life of four mothers: Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair and their four daughters: Jing-mei "June" Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. All four of these families fled China in the 1940s and tried to retain and maintain their culture and heritage. All of the four daughters are very Americanized and the mothers try to show and teach each of their daughters a little about the chinese culture. All these mothers hope to give their daughter strength, respect for herself, and to create a strong bond and relationship between themselves. Tan gives us something to relate to by telling us the story of Chinese women and their daughters. The all may

The Joy Luck Club is a movie that focuses on the relationships between four mothers and daughters. Each of the mothers in the movie have had at one time experienced something sad or unfortunate while living in China which made them evaluate the way that women are valued in that society. Each of them took the effort to find their own self-worth and change their destiny after they had followed through with the traditional Chinese values. They decided to start new lives, which meant moving to San Francisco and forgetting about the traditional Chinese stereotypes that had once controlled them. Having a similar past they started what was called The Joy Luck Club. After having children in America they began

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

    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