The Joy Luck Club By Amy Tan

Adaptation is the adjustment to one's surrounding conditions. Many animals experience this through physical and behavioral changes based on new obstacles they may face in their environments. They could be surrounded by new species of predatory animals or sources of food that require a new set of skills. Similarly, this can be experienced by humans as well. When a person finds themself in a new place they may need to change in order to survive. In Amy Tan’s fiction novel, The Joy Luck Club, immigrant Chinese mothers share their life stories from back in China, their journies to the states, and the relationships with their American born daughters. They learn a new language, society and overall way of life. However, assimilation into the American culture dramatically separates the connection between the mother’s and their daughters. The mother’s lost themselves on their way to the United States and must deal with the negative realities of their American born children, and see their daughters drifting further away from their 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.

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

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.

“Life is a journey, not a destination.” This quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the idea that one should not worry about what happens when one’s life come to an end but worry more about making the most with the time that they are given. Margaret Atwood’s metafiction “Happy Endings” explores Emerson’s ideas that the ending to something should not matter. It should matter how that ending came to be. In “Happy Endings” Atwood writes tales that all have the same ending. All the stories have a common theme of a boy, a girl, and love. In the tale “B” the girl falls in love with the boy, but he is a terrible human who treats as nothing more than a sex object. She ends up killing herself and then the boy meets a new girl whom he has a happy ending with. All the stories like this one deal with similar themes, but have vastly different plots that lead to the same ending. By telling different stories that have the same ending Atwood shows how little the ending really matters. Atwood claims that putting emphasis on the ending of a story is wrong, because it 's the buildup, the rising action, the reason why the ending works is what truly matters. Atwood, along with an overall sarcastic tone, structures her paper in a way that makes the ending of a story seem unimportant and uninteresting. She also makes the tales towards the end of her metafiction vaguer where she only alludes to much more interesting plot that her characters are involved with. This also adds to making the ending

In the novel The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, four Chinese mother-daughter pairs, each with her own unique story, have deep connections with each other. At the beginning of the novel they each seem like ordinary women, but as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that these women are more than just mothers, daughters, or wives; they can also be considered heroes according to Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell says a hero is someone who undergoes a departure, where the person is confronted with a problem that they must overcome; a fulfillment, where the person finally overcomes the problem; and a return, where the person passes on what they gain and learn from the experiences in the form of a "life-giving elixir"(Campbell). This “life-giving

Once An-Mei’s mother comes back into the picture while Popo is on her deathbed, she truly tries to do what she can to help her mother. She never leaves her side, even though she dishonored her family. “My mother took her flesh and put it in the soup. She cooked magic in the ancient tradition to try to cure her mother this one last time.” (Schmidt and Crockett, 295).

“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.

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

When An- Mei was young, she always listened and believed everything people told her. An- mei never once told her point of view to someone because she knew her grandmother, Popo, would find out. She had gotten a scar on her neck from boiling soup of the last time she remembered her mother showing up to the big family dinners. After the would healed, An- mei describes, “The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain” (Tan 47). During her childhood, Popo always taught her to be strong, and to never admit how emotional she really felt. An- mei believed her experience from getting the scar and her childhood experience were connected.

The relationship between mothers and daughters in both China and the United States in The Joy Luck Club not only apply a link connect the past and the present but also represent how to deal with individual and cultural identity. Hamilton, Patricia L. "Feng Shui, Astrology, and the Five Elements: Traditional Chinese Belief in Amy Tan's the Joy Luck Club." Melus 24, no. 2 (Summer, 1999):125-145. Hamilton thinks that in The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan's use Chinese religious, philosophical, and folkloric beliefs to develop her characters. Hamilton represents the problems between immigrant mothers and their American daughters are the misunderstanding of these traditional beliefs.

“The apple does not fall far from the tree”. A known quote that actually explains why children eventually turn out similar from their parents. Children becomes similar to their parents as they gain experience and culture from them and inherit part of their traits, characteristics, personality, and flaws. Children and their parents are rooted to each other. This strong family connection is present in the novel Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan. The book traces the poignant destinies of two generations of Chinese woman that suffer throughout their journey of arriving in the United States. One mother-daughter pair, An-mei Hsu and Rose Hsu, recounts their journeys that seem different however they are much connected. Both of them are more relatable than

An-Mei’s mother was estranged from the family for years until Popo got very ill, which is when she returned. An-Mei’s mother’s voice triggers a memory from An-Mei’s childhood of her leaving, and as An-Mei relives the memory, she begins to understand that wounds heal and bad relationships get repaired. An-Mei continues to grow to like her mother when she watches her cut a piece of herself to help Popo. An-Mei’s mother’s action teaches that “pain of the flesh is nothing,” and that no matter how hard An-Mei tries to forget her mother, she cannot do so because they are connected (48). An-Mei’s mother runs “inside [her] bones” (48).

Margaret Atwood writes a short story titled “Happy Endings”. The authors choice of words for the title can be misleading because of the contrary of the actually text. The title of the text could seem sort of juvenile if one was judging the complexity of her text from her title. Which goes back to the saying “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover”, and in this case it would be taken more literal. The first 3 lines of her text are: