The Joy Luck Club By Amy Tan

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.

Amy Tan had many personal experiences in her story. For example, when Amy Tan was living in Northern California, her mother had very high expectations on her. Her mother wanted her to be with the American society and be the best she could be. Amy Tan had to get a haircut very short to the way other famous children were acting in the United States. Amy’s mother was the one who encouraged this. With that, in the story “Two Kinds,” the young girl named Jing-mei live in a part of California and she had to get a very short haircut. Jing-mei’s mother wanted her daughter to look and act the same way Shirley Temple did. Within both of the girls lives, they each had to act like an already famous person exactly to please their mothers.

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.

Sacrifice is “an act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else.” -Anonymous. The Outsiders, by H.E Hinton is a book where Ponyboy and friends live life in a gang. You can see sacrifices being made in order for them to better the lives of each other. One theme evident in the novel is people make sacrifices for the things they care about.

Even though some sacrafices are not neccesary, they hardest ones are made for those who you love. Sacrifice plays a major role as one of the main themes in the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Sacrifices were made for the mothers and daughters which were fueled by love and honor, such as when An-Mei sacrificed her own flesh and blood for her dying mother, Suyuan giving up her children so they could live a happy life, and An-Mei risking her life and sacrificing a sapphire ring from her mother. These were all made for the sake of somebody else's good and for love of somebody else.

In society there are still differences in classes such as higher class, middle class, and lower class. In sociology, we observed a film called The Pursuit Happyness, where we witnessed the struggles a father went through to succeed. Chris Gardner, who was played by Will Smith, is living in his apartment with his wife and his son. Due to their struggles, the mother walks out on and leaves Chris struggling alone with his son. In the film Chris Gardner applies for an unpaid internship for a competitive stockbroker company where out of twenty men, only one gets the job. While he is on his internship, we see the hardships of getting kicked out of his apartment to staying at a shelter home to then sleeping in a subway bathroom with his son. Viewing the movie through a sociological lens, The Pursuit of Happyness will be analyzed according to the major three sociological paradigms: structural functionalism, social conflict theory, and symbolic interactionalism.

Culture defines humanity. Culture makes humans different than any other living organism ever known. Culture is what makes humans unique, and yet culture is easily the most misunderstood characteristic of individuals. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan develops the theme of incomplete cultural understanding leads to an inability to communicate one’s true intentions through juxtaposition and conflict between mothers and daughters and their cultures.

Waverly was going to tell Lindo of her and Rich’s engagement, but whenever she mentioned him, Lindo cut her off and began to talk about something else. Waverly was convinced that her mother did not have any good intentions, and that she never saw good in people. Due to this, she was afraid of what her mother will say when she would meet Rich. According to Waverly, she and Rich shared a “pure love”, which she was afraid her mother would poison. Waverly planned to go to Auntie Suyuan’s house with Rich for dinner, knowing that her mother would then invite the two over for dinner to her house, and this would give her mother a chance to get to know and warm up to Rich. However, when they went for dinner, Rich did everything incorrectly- he didn’t understand Chinese customs and made several mistakes that were seen as

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.

At some point in their life, every person has been told to “walk in somebody else’s shoes” because they need to be aware of the struggles that other people face, but it is often tough for people to understand things outside of the scope of their own practical knowledge. In her memoir, Lucky, Alice Sebold suffers from this same problem. Throughout the course of her narrative, Sebold thinks of her experience as something that is accessible to be understood by outsiders; in addition to this, Sebold paints her reactions and experiences as a model that she can apply to other victims of sexual assault. Even though Sebold’s story is one of strength in the face of horrible occurrences, her lack of acknowledgement in regards the ways in which other people’s consciousness and coping mechanisms differ from her own makes it far more difficult to sympathize with her than it should be considering the content of her memoir. Evidence of her closed world understanding can be seen from the beginning of the memoir, when she reports her sexual assault to the police (Sebold, 3), later in the narrative, when other people react to her experiences and related feelings (Sebold 146), and finally, and perhaps most significantly, when her close friend Lila undergoes a sexual assault (Sebold 220).

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan follows multiple Chinese-American women who struggle with their self-identity and creating a balance between American and Chinese culture. Because of their immigration and many hardships in life, many of the women feel like they cannot truly tell who they are anymore, and throughout the novel these women are portrayed as ghosts. Ghosts are used to symbolize these women because they share many parallels including being only a remnant of who they once were, or who they could be. Ying-ying St. Clair is one of the women, who has a daughter named Lena St. Clair, she has had a troubled past in China, which has made her lose her fighting spirit, and her spirit in general. Ying-ying is fully aware of her loss of spirit and is embarrassed because she considers ghosts to be shameful and weak, and wants to save her daughter, Lena, from her fate.

There are many different types of parents with diverse parenting styles in the world. Some are efficient in their ways, while others struggle to wonder why their child did not turn out to be everything they hoped. The controversial topic of whether the parent knows what is best for their child hangs over the reader’s head in Amy Chua’s article.

According to my father, there are no clear or burdensome parts of being a parent, however being a parent entrusts a person to be accountable for providing the basic needs for their children. For instance, education, correct behavior, and principles. Sacrifices are typically seen with families, but not by Mr. Trihemasava. Mr. Trihemasava stated that he did not relinquish anything, because he gives his family his love and time as much as he can. Being a parent is always difficult, but there are no guidelines to being a good or bad parent. In my father’s opinion, “teaching or telling the children what is good for their life, what they are supposed to do, and how to prepare for their future, such as working hard at school, is what I would consider a good parent” (Trihemasava). My father repeatedly says “when you are tired, you go to sleep, when you wake up you feel refreshed, when you are hungry, you go to sleep and wake up still hungry” (Trihemasava). The intention behind this quote is to work for necessities.

“In 2009, 33 million people in the United States were second generation immigrants, representing 11% of the national population. The children of such immigrants in the U.S., also known as "second generation immigrants," experience a cultural conflict between that of their parents and that of mainstream U.S. society” (Wikipedia 1). Amy Tan the author of “Two Kinds”, and the young character in the story both are a second generation immigrants, who have struggled in their life with parents, about the culture they assimilating and their real culture.

Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines sacrifice as to give something up or something that is lost. In my mind, an example of sacrifice is when a police officer puts his life on the line to help someone in danger, or a firefighter running into a burning building to save a little girl or a doctor going into rural towns to help people who are too poor to pay for health care.