Mother-daughter Relations and Clash of Cultures 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.

    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.

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

There is a common theme of hope throughout the stories of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Even in the face of immeasurable danger and strife, the mothers and daughters in the book find themselves faithful in the future by looking to the past, which is only helped by the format of Tan’s writing. This is shown specifically in the stories of Suyuan and Jing-Mei Woo, Lena and Ying-Ying St. Clair, and Lindo and Waverly Jong. The vignette structure of The Joy Luck Club allows the stories to build on one another in a way that effortlessly displays both the happy and dark times in each mother’s life, which lets their experiences act as sources of background and guidance to their daughters in times when they need it most.

 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

In her 1989 novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan hones into the narratives of four Chinese American immigrant families living in San Francisco. The novel is structured into four distinct, anecdotal sections: two dedicated to mothers and two dedicated to daughters. Tan’s approach to structure allows the interlocking stories between mother and daughter to place emphasis on the issue of sexism. The purpose of Tan’s novel is to highlight that, even though American and Chinese societies drastically differ, there still remains a recurring theme of chauvinism. Erica Jong says, “Sexism kind of predisposes us to see men's work as more important than women's, and it is a problem, I guess, as writers, we have to change.” Through her purpose, Tan is

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.

    Amy Tan's immensely popular novel, The Joy Luck Club explores the issues faced by first and second generation Chinese immigrants, particularly mothers and daughters. Although Tan's book is a work of fiction, many of the struggles it describes are echoed in Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographical work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The pairs of mothers and daughters in both of these books find themselves separated along both cultural and generational lines. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs, and geographic loyalty. The gulf between these women is sadly acknowledged by Ying-ying St. Clair when she says of

The Joy Luck Club is a collection of many interrelated stories that are centered around the diverse emotional relationships of different mother and daughter relationships. Most of these mother daughter relationships are fragile and become even more distanced through history and heritage. In China, these mothers are forced to emigrate from China to America to escape a life full of poverty and war. America differs from this because the mothers struggle to raise their American born daughters in a completely different environment. The difference is extreme from growing up during the first quarter of the twentieth century in China, rather than raising their daughters in California. To this day, the mothers of present day China still believe and encourage their daughters to follow in their footsteps and praise chinese traditions. The mothers, Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-Ying St. Clair and the daughters, Jing-Mei “June” Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair all have dynamic relationships that are evolving. In the novel, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, man’s relationship with his fellow man is unequal due to cultural traditions and generations.

History, Culture and Identity of Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

In a 1992 speech given to the Novel of the Americas Symposium at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Tan says, “there is no unified racial description. Nobody can define cultural identity. There is no consistency in race” (Snodgrass 12).This statement says a lot about Tan and her determination to not be identified as any race. Race has been an issue for her since she was a child and she’s still dealing with being identified as an “Asian writer”. She proved everyone wrong by showing that she is more than an ethnic writer. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, published in 1988 and brought the author great victory. The reviews were positive and it became a best-seller in many countries (Huntley 41). The book was based on eight women, 4 mother and daughter duos. The mothers in the book deal with having an American-raised daughter and the struggles they face. The main character, Jing-Mei, takes a trip to China with her father. Her mother has passed away but her lifelong dream of finding her twin daughters never died. Jing-mei’s mother, Suyaun, had twin daughters when she was previously married in China. The twins were older than Jing-mei but Suyaun abandoned them when they were babies. Suyaun was the wife of an officer before marrying Jing-mei’s father. Just by reading this short description of The Joy Luck Club, it’s clear that Tan was inspired by her mother’s early confession of her previous daughters. Jing-Mei comes back to China and decides to gather her mother’s three friends. She ends up creating “The Joy Luck Club” and allows the women to talk with one another about their relationship with their daughters. The book allows young girls to relate to everyday problems girls have with their mothers. The platform Tan created for young women in her writing is what aided in her success. In 1993, The Joy Luck Club went on to become a well-known motion picture ("Daisy Tan Dies at

She illustrates very clearly how having different cultural experiences within a family can lead family members not to understand each other. For example, the mother wants to control the daughter, who has a different culture, and this is not easy to do; in fact, it may be impossible – and at least, as the book shows, understanding takes time. Also, the mother seems to be having behavior problems because of her way of demanding things of her daughter, which is totally wrong. As a mother, when you tell something to your daughter you should be respectful and polite at same time, in order that your child could listen to you, consider your requests, and even obey you in their way. The way that you treat them, they will treat you back. Some parents may not be used to this depending on how they were raised, but this story shows that such an approach could have been more successful. Toward the end of the story it seems that the mother and daughter developed more respect and understanding for one another – but this took space, time, wisdom, respect, and patience. Outside of her family home, we know that Tan has been able to find success on her own terms as a writer, having been inspired by other “bi-cultural” writers such as Louise Erdrich, and embarking on her journey in literature. After visiting China with her mother,

In Amy Tan's novel, The Joy Luck Club talks about the many mother-daughter relationships between the people in the story, relationships between spouses, their friends, and even their enemies. These relationships ,in the largest probability,are different aspects of the relationship that Amy Tan had with her mother, and other parts are just things that she made up. Therefore, Amy Tan believes that the effects of cultures and tradition between a family can cause burdens and can cause the whole family to fall apart.

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is an intriguing book. The Joy Luck Club is an extraordinary fictional book. Amy Tan has an individual association with the moms and girls in this story. The characters in this story depend on some actual occasions from Amy Tan's family history. Rarely, will one ever discover a story that emerges as much as Amy Tan's. In a couple of ways, people can identify with the stories in this the same amount of as Amy Tan does. One might experience considerable difficulties to the arrangement of the book for the reason that it tends to ricochet forward and backward into various stories between the mothers and daughters, nonetheless, as it were, it keeps the story crisp in a way where one will not become exhausted. The way

Amy Tan’s touching novel The Joy Luck follows four mothers/daughters pairings. Each pair had a momentous experience from childhood that had an impact on them in their adulthood. The impact is shown by the way Suyuan Woo, Lindo Jong, Ying-ying St. Clair, and An-mei Hsu, who left their country for their own respective reasons raise their daughters. The Joy Luck is centered around their American-born daughters Jing-mei “June” Woo, Waverly Jong, Lena St. Clair, and Rose Hsu Jordan. The problems each daughter is faced with stem from the complicated relationship they have with their mothers. In The Joy Luck, Tan illustrates how the lack of communication can put a strain on a relationship. Unresolved conflict has an effect on not only the relationship but alter the way you see or interact with that individual or others. Parental relationships aren’t immune to encountering this conflict, Tan uses the mother-daughter dynamic as a theme to illustrate the power of communication through Jing-mei Woo her mother, Suyuan Woo. The theme of lack of communication is used to show and teach a moral lesson; in order to mend a relationship you must be willing to communicate and stop holding grudges because life is short.