The Joy Luck Club Summary

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.

First of all, the Joy Luck Club had so many conflicts and misunderstandings between almost all of the characters. Most of the conflicts were between Waverly and her mom. Some conflicts were just differences between Waverly and her mother because of the generation gap between the two. Her mom didn’t like the things she would do and she could never see herself doing things that Waverly was doing back when she was a child. There were also cultural and martial conflicts throughout the book also.

Many women find that their mothers have the greatest influence on their lives and the way their strengths and weaknesses come together. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters are followed through vignettes about their upbringings and interactions. One of the mothers, An-Mei Hsu, grows up away from her mother who has become the 4th wife of a rich man; An-Mei is forced to live with her grandmother once her mother is banned from the house, but eventually reunites and goes to live in the man’s house with her mother. Her daughter, Rose, has married an American man, Ted, but their marriage begins to end as he files for divorce; Rose becomes depressed and unsure what to do, despite

The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan's first novel. It consists of four sections with sixteen short stories. One of the main issues of the novel is the relationship between Chinese mothers and their Chinese – American daughters. ‘‘Your mother is in your bones.’’ (Tan 1998, 30) There is a cultural chasm between them because of the difference in the way they were brought up and different influences of the environment.

When Jing Mei recognizes the similarities between her mother and herself she begins to understand not only her mother but herself as well. There are subtle connections and likenesses from the beginning between Jing Mei and her mother that Jing Mei does not see. The book commences with Jing Mei taking her mother's place at the mah jong table, creating a similarity between them from the beginning. Suyuan dies two months before the start of the book, and therefore is not able to tell the stories. Jing Mei has learned and must tell her stories in her place, forming another parallelism between mother and daughter. Because Suyuan is dead, Jing Mei must act in place of her mother when she goes to meet her Chinese sisters in China. Throughout the book Jing Mei takes the place of Suyuan, showing she and her mother

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.

Another conflict that arises from Confucianism is when Jing-mei was told to go back to China and tell her half-sisters about their mother. She said “‘what will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything.’” (Tan 31). In Confucianism, very little of tradition is explicitly told from mothers to daughters in the form of text. Ritual actions are supposed to be observed, absorbed and understood in order to be preserved and handed down for posterity. But Jing-mei, who grew up in America, did not have a sense of following the tradition her mother brought to America, or rather considered the Chinese tradition to be eccentric.

    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

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.

In the essay Tan writes about her mother’s English and its influence. Learning a language can be very difficult because not only you have to learn the language, but you also must learn vocabulary and having to cope with a different culture. Tan’s mother is a great illustration of this adjustment to English-based American culture while in some cases proceed to think in Chinese ways. Tan to begin with thought that her mother’s English is “broken”, but she then realized that her mother’s English reflects a blend of diverse societies, and she really benefits from this blend of both Chinese and American societies through her distributed making, appearing to as a one of a kind class of Chinese American composing both in this paper and her other books. when I carefully read through this essay.

Have you ever played a game of mahjong? Mahjong is a solitaire matching game which used mahjong tiles. This game brings people together to create and reminisce memories while feasting on Chinese delicacies. In The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan reinforces the mothers’ bonds through meeting up to play mahjong in their club. They try to influence their daughters to take part in this Chinese tradition, but the girls have different views. They try to become part of an American society, and look back at their Chinese descent with distaste. While the mothers of The Joy Luck Club are determined to keep their Chinese heritage, their daughters are open and willing to experience a new American lifestyle, which causes conflicts between the mothers and daughters.

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

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.

    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

In the essay Tan writes about her mother’s English and its influence. Learning a language can be very difficult because not only you have to learn the language, but you also must learn vocabulary and having to cope with a different culture. Tan’s mother is a great illustration of this adjustment to English-based American culture while in some cases proceed to think in Chinese ways. Tan to begin with thought that her mother’s English is “broken”, but she then realized that her mother’s English reflects a blend of diverse societies, and she really benefits from this blend of both Chinese and American societies through her distributed making, appearing to as a one of a kind class of Chinese American composing both in this paper and her other books. when I carefully read through this essay.