Style Analysis of Amy Tan in "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.

Furthermore, the effectiveness of the language techniques utilised throughout the story and the relevance the novel has on contemporary audiences will be highlighted.

The author’s style tends to consist of a distinct type of word choice and tends to use descriptive words to properly describe where and when the story is taking place.

 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

“Here is how I came to love my mother.  How I saw her my own true nature.  What was beneath my skin.  Inside my bones.” (Tan 40)

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.

    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 literary concepts to be discussed in this journal are theme, symbolism, and ending. The theme of a novel gives the reader a true picture of reality of the nature of humans, which makes the novel more interesting to read. Humans have difficulty to trust normal people in a situation of insanity. The boy from the couple says, “It’s okay, man, we’re cool.” Mason asks the couple, “How do I know you’re not one of them.”

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

After her brother’s passing, Tan’s family visited Europe where “After several missteps, the three wanderers settled in Montreux, Switzerland, where Amy fell in love, nearly eloped, played an unwitting role in the drug bust of friends....” (Amy Tan). Along with dealing with her brother’s death, she also went through her father’s death, also caused by brain tumors. In an interview with a worker from Rappler.com, Tan says “In Joy Luck Club there's one father in the beginning who remains throughout the story. He's the one who tells June about her mother's wish for her. But people have wondered why don't I write about my father…The way I remember him is through his absence” (Rappler). She often states that she uses the characteristics of some of her family members in her stories to show the reality of her own life experiences without writing an autobiography. In her biography on amytan.net, it says that she

Amy Tan, as a child, was born into a very rough life. Her brother and father died of brain tumors at a young age which led her to move from her “diseased home” to Montreux, Switzerland, where she completed high school. ( Facts on FIle ) It was a huge impact on her life and reflected a turning point into a whole new world.

Tone is a literary device that is common in most works of writing. It is an attitude of a writer toward a subject or an audience. It is significant in that not only does it express the attitude of the author, but it also helps to quicken the pace of the plot. In the poem “Variations of the Word ‘“love”’,” Margaret Atwood wrote:

In the opening introduction of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan starts off by making a mother say “In America, I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English (3).” All the mothers in these three novels desire that their daughters have a voice because their own silence had brought them down. In America, women are not held back, but empowered to do as they please.

Amy Tan was born in 1952 when she turned fifteen her brother and her father died of a brain tumor six months apart. She became a writer and is someone who is very passionate about language and its applications to the world. She spent a lot of her time thinking about the power language possessed towards an individual. Amy Tan was an immigrant to the United States and she was Asian-American she picked up on english moderately quick. She is well recognized for one of her best selling books The Joy Luck Club which has been translated into twenty five different languages. Amy’s mother did not live long enough to witness her daughter's success she passed away from Alzheimer's disease in 1999. When Amy was younger people were disrespecting