Summary Of Amy Tan's 'Joy Luck Club'

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.

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.

In Amy tans short stories Rules of the Game, Fish Cheeks, and Two Kinds part of the novel the Joys Luck Club uses topics concerning the limits and connections in the relationships between mothers and their daughters. In an Asian society, especially Chinese society assumes a vital part in every one of the three short stories, giving the primary conflict an interesting plot. Amy Tans short stories for the most part depict the inconveniences and strain between Chinese immigrant moms and their Americanized daughters through their common experiences in a captivating way. The daughters disregard the Chinese part of their heritage and personality and grasp the American side. They ponder their adolescence up with solid order and desires that the greater part of them have not met prompting future blame. Presently as developed ladies with their own particular families, the Americanized daughters mirror the past with contradictions they had with their Chinese society. Every daughter in the story’s in the long run perceives how their tradition and generation had huge influence in forming their characters making them grasp their Chinese legacy.

    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

As a child, Waverly didn’t enjoy following her mother’s rules and Chinese tradition. At that age she would’ve loved to get rid of her Chinese features. But as an adult, Waverly seemed concerned that she would fit in with the locals during her trip to China, and upset when her mother told her that the people would know that she was a foreigner. Instead of trying to reject her culture as before, Waverly seems to want “the best of both worlds”, a way to embrace both her American lifestyle and Chinese culture. However, her mother, Lindo Jong, deemed the attempt at balance “too late” and describes her daughter as “American-made”.

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.

Lindo was arranged to marry Tyan-yu. While the marriage was short-lived, Tyan-yu constantly lied to Lindo, and Tyan-yu’s mother treated Lindo like an object to be bartered between families. Lindo experiences depression being trapped in this lifestyle, so she decides to flee to America in order to escape it. When reminiscing on her marriage Lindo says, “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” (Tan ). Similar to the mother in the beginning, Tan creates appeal to pathos, forcing the reader to sympathize with Lindo. The reader’s sympathy to Lindo allows Tan to expand on the larger issue of sexism, creating an emotional and educational tone in order to coax the reader into, again, understanding the true scale of sexism. Tan drilling this larger idea of sexism into readers changes the reader’s perspective. With new perspective, readers notice the need for change to establish equality between both sexes. Therefore, Tan is using her writing as a tool for a deeper subject: exciting change within the world, and thus, exemplifying Jong’s words.

Lindo and Waverly are two women who experienced very different childhoods, where the society and cultures of China and America pushed them in separate directions. Lindo grew up in China, where family is the single most important priority. At the young age of two, she is “promised to the Huangs’ son for marriage” (51) by her parents through a matchmaker. She is “an obedient wife” (56), learning to please Huang Taitai while planning a way to null the marriage arrangement. By living a dual identity at such a young age, she learns to be inconspicuous and clever. The effectiveness in how she claimed Tin Jong as her second

The Joy Luck Club is a novel by Amy Tan which tells the individual, cohesive stories of Chinese American daughters and their Chinese mothers. In each story, the cultural differences between mother and daughter acts as a wedge between them. The conflicting cultures of descent and consent causes a conflict between mother and daughter; although they ultimately want to have a relationship with each other, the differences in values make coming together harder. For the mothers, their expectations for their daughters are high, while the daughters are trying to understand how China fits into their American lives. This conflict between values perpetuates until there is an acceptance of each way of life.

    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

The “Joy Luck Club,” by Amy Tan, is a collection of short stories about the relationships between Chinese born mothers and their American born daughters. The story called “Four Directions” is about a woman named Waverly Jong. The story is about Waverly trying to tell her mother that she is getting married to a American man named Richard. Waverly was a chess champion as while she was a young girl and she remembers the strategy that she used in her matches, and in her life, as she tries to tell her mother about a marriage to an American man. Waverly’s mother was raised in China under Chinese traditions. Waverly’s mother wants Waverly to marry a Chinese man and dos not want Waverly to marry an American man.

Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, explores mother-daughter relationships and what it means to grow up as a first generation Chinese-American. These unique relationships become even more complex by the cultural differences and generational gaps that exist between the mothers and their daughters. The Chinese mothers belong to a culture where people “will say [their] worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch” but their daughters belong to another culture where they “…speak only perfect American English” (Tan, 1995). Amy Tan is a brilliant storyteller even though she’s telling more than her story. It is clear that Amy Tan’s Chinese culture had a strong influence The Joy Luck Club; however, as an African-American woman I strongly identified with the lives of her characters.