The Joy Luck Club Is The Power Of Storytelling

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.

The members of The Joy Luck Club are four elderly ‘aunties’ who gather once a week in San Francisco to play Mah-jong and eat Chinese food. When one of the women dies, her daughter Jing-mei (June) is invited to take her place. “What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything. She was my mother.’’ (Tan 1998, 30) When she realizes that she knows very little about her own mother she asks the ‘aunties’ to tell her more about her. That is when they start telling each other stories.

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.

The Joy Luck Club portrays strong women. The examples that come across most strikingly to the reader are the women who lived in traditional China. An-Mei Hsu gained her strong will from her mother's weak spirit. In her story, titled "Magpies," An-Mei's mother is forced

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.

Raymond Chandler, a fiction writer, once said, "The most durable thing in writing is style." True, the style is often defined as one of the most important elements in writing. In Amy Tan's novel, "The Joy Luck Club", the style significantly contributes to the development of both the tone and the theme of the influences that a mother can have on her daughter. The author effectively portrays the somber tone and the theme by using a concise style of diction, images, details, language, sentence structure, point of view, and organization.

culture and it teaches important life lessons that anyone can learn from. Tan depicts in her stories

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.

Characterization is a widely-used literary tool in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Specifically, each mother and daughter is a round character that undergoes change throughout the novel. Characterization is important in the novel because it directly supports the central theme of the mother-daughter relationship, which was relevant in Tan’s life. Tan grew up with an immigrant mother, and Tan expresses the difficulties in communication and culture in the stories in her book. All mothers in the book are immigrants to America, and all daughters grew up living the American lifestyle, creating conflict between the mothers and daughters due to miscommunication. Characterization of the mothers and daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Club creates and

All literature is created by themes, without themes, they would simply be stories, and within those themes are patterns; constantly repeating throughout the work. Throughout the novel, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, the use of themes and repeating patterns are seen through four different families. Some of the most prominent themes or patterns are family, specifically mother-daughter relationships, women and femininity, and growth in characters.

The relationship a mother has with her daughter is one of the most significant relationships either person will possess. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the stories of four mothers and their respective daughters are established through vignettes, which reveal the relationships between them. Throughout the novel, the mothers and daughters are revealed to be similar, yet different. Lindo and Waverly Jong can be compared and contrasted through their upbringings, marriages, and personalities.

In The Joy Luck Club, language devices such as figurative language, diction, sentence structure, and significant detail are used to characterize the different characters in the book. These language devices capture the characters’ emotions, personality, qualities of mind, and goals. Amy Tan uses a variety of language devices to characterize Ying-ying’s emotions of sorrow, disconnection, shame, love, her passive, careless personality, and her quality of mind of determination.

The common theses of Amy Tan’s work include hope, loss, mother-daughter relationships, failure, and success. Amy Tan is extremely effective in connecting with the reader through themes and lessons. The prominent theme of mother-daughter relationships is evident in The Joy Luck Club because “[her] mother believed you could be anything you want in America” (Tan 132). The effect and influence of mother-daughter relationships is evident in The Joy Luck Club because it demonstrates the formation of the American voice by expressing the deep connection intertwined between four women and their daughters that were born in America. In the novel, Aunti An-Mei hoped that “in America, [she] will have a daughter just like [her]. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch. Over there nobody will look down of her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English” (Tan 17). This quote encompasses hope for a new life in America that will provide an opportunity for her daughter to fulfill her own dreams and goals for the new future ahead in America. This quote also demonstrates the theme of mother-daughter relationships by making a point about wanting the best for her daughter in America in every

    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