Strengths and Weaknesses in The Joy Luck Club Essay

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.

An-Mei spent her entire life putting on a brave face for the sake of others to ensure all was well in her life, and her mother and her mother before her taught An-Mei that sacrifice was necessary to ensure a better life for future descendents. This can be accounted for when An-Mei’s mother sacrificed her life to make sure An-Mei would have a good future with Wu-Tsing and his many concubines. An-Mei however knows the toll of masking her emotions all too well, and she wishes Rose would take her advice and stand up for herself and take what is rightfully hers while still maintaining her relationship with Ted.

Amy Tan, who wants to understand and figure out her own affiliation between her another mother, wrote The Joy Luck Club. This book explains and uses words to show the differences between the daughters and their mothers by putting in the Chinese culture and the western culture in the article. The Joy Luck Club has four different sections. And they all have common backgrounds but have different meanings behind them.

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.

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.

 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.

During one of the first examples in the novel, An-Mei sacrificed her own blood and tears for her mother because it was her way of showing

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

“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever”, Amy Tan wrote in The Joy Luck Club. This powerful quote not only exhibits the mindset that Amy has formed over the years, but also how various lessons has shaped her inner-being. Overcoming a past were all the odds were against her, even her mother, leaves Tan’s story worth being heard. Amy’s mixed heritage made adapting to the free life of America from an authoritarian Chinese parenting style difficult. The pivotal moment that altered Amy Tan’s life the most was breaking free from the philosophy that she had to chose one culture instead of accepting both.

    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

In the story I learned that An-Mei is self-confident, because she knew her mother would return back one day she also never lose hope. As An-Mei grew older she became more independent and open minded. She also had to learn how to do everything for herself once her grandmother became very ill. In the reading the children were told not to acknowledge that their mother was a ghost to their family, but every time An-Mei or her little brother got in trouble their aunt way of disciplining them was to constantly remind them that they was following in their mother footstep and that they were unfortunate to the family. An-Mei was also self-disciplined because in the book she said “so sometimes when I had thrown pebbles at other children at school, or had lost a book through carelessness, I would quickly walk by my father with a know-nothing look and hide in the corner of my room where he couldn’t see my face”, which means that she knew would get in trouble if she would of got caught. From reading the story I learned that An-Mei was raised in a strict home. In the story An-Mei mentions “Even though I was young, I could see the pain of flesh and the worth of the

Kindness runs through An-mei's bones. Her mother once sacrificed a piece of her flesh to help cure Popo and sacrificed her life to give An-mei a better one. An-mei strongly believes mothers live on in the bones of their children, so An-mei's kindness originated from her mother. Like her mother An-mei puts others first

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.