Mother-Daughter Relationships In 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.

   In Amy Tan's novel, Joy Luck Club, the mother of Jing-mei recognizes only two kinds of daughters: those that are obedient and those that follow their own mind. Perhaps the reader of this novel may recognize only two types of mothers: pushy mothers and patient mothers.  The two songs, "Pleading Child" and "Perfectly Contented," which the daughter plays, reinforce the underlying tension in the novel. These songs represent the feelings that the daughter, Jing-mei, has had throughout her life.

    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.

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.

"But even if I had known I was getting such a bad husband, I had no choice, now or later. That was how backward families in the country were. We were always the last to give up stupid old- fashioned customs" (24). Amy Tan, the writer of The Joy Luck Club, incorporates many Chinese customs and traditions along with personal experiences into her writing. Because times change and new generations are produced and brought into the world, conflicts tend to arise between parents and their children. From issues on self-worth to having trouble embracing the Chinese culture, Tan creates a storyline incorporating three mother/daughter pairs who truly encompass these challenges. Upon analyzing

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

 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

   "I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worst possible thing" (Amy Tan 121). Throughout The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan tells stories of how mothers use the misfortunes in their lives, to try to teach their daughters about life. Many of the mothers had bad experiences in their pasts and do not want to see their daughters live through the same types of problems. They try to make their daughters' lives as easy and problem free as possible. However, the daughters do not see this as an act of love, but rather as an act of control. In the end, the daughters realize that their mothers tried to use their experiences to teach them not to give up hope, and to look at

    The complexitities of any mother-daughter relationship go much deeper then just their physical features that resemble one another.  In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, the stories of eight Chinese women are told.  Together this group of women forms four sets of mother and daughter pairs. The trials and triumphs, similarities and differences, of each relationship with their daughter are described, exposing the inner makings of four perfectly matched pairs.  Three generations of the Hsu family illustrate how both characteristics and

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.

If you want to unite beliefs you can’t neglect the culture. Amy Tan's Novel the Joy luck is a beautiful story about the relationships between four mothers and four daughters. It tells of their experiences and hardships of the mothers and the daughters. Yet the pairs neglect each other cultures. Suyuan Woo and June woo have their fair share of culture clashes.

    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