Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan Essay

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.

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.

Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships.  The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had.  In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture).  They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life.  These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3).  To

 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

    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.

To begin with, The Joy Luck Club centers its content around the lives of eight women of Chinese heritage each with their own stories to tell; yet, all striving to satisfy their aspirations in America. A concisive cross is common between the mothers’ hopes compared to those of the American born daughters. Immigrating to America for various reasons, the four mothers all had one goal in mind, to not only construct themselves a better life, but also ensure the finest future for their daughters. For the mothers in the Joy Luck Club, the American dream was to instill Chinese history, heritage, and habit in their daughters while providing American opportunities of growth, gratification, and gallantry. Carrying heavy pasts, the four original American Joy Luck Club members arrived in The United States to start anew, “America was where

“…it was us, all of us, who were failing, and the hallmark of our failure was the way we are with our heads down, hungrily, quickly, because there was nothing else to do at the table” (102).

In her 1989 novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan hones into the narratives of four Chinese American immigrant families living in San Francisco. The novel is structured into four distinct, anecdotal sections: two dedicated to mothers and two dedicated to daughters. Tan’s approach to structure allows the interlocking stories between mother and daughter to place emphasis on the issue of sexism. The purpose of Tan’s novel is to highlight that, even though American and Chinese societies drastically differ, there still remains a recurring theme of chauvinism. Erica Jong says, “Sexism kind of predisposes us to see men's work as more important than women's, and it is a problem, I guess, as writers, we have to change.” Through her purpose, Tan is

Amy Tan said in the People Magazine in 1989 about her novel, The Joy Luck Club, “The book could be about any culture or generation and what is lost between them.” Amy Tan reveals that the mothers try to pass on their Chinese heritage and teach their American-born daughters to avoid the mistakes the mothers made growing up in China. However, the daughters often see their mothers’ attempts at guidance as attempting to control their lives. The mother and daughter pair of Lindo and Waverly epitomize this relationship, where Lindo tries to integrate Chinese and American cultures into her own life and Waverly tries to both be independent and keep her Chinese heritage. Although Waverly and Lindo do not mend their cultural conflicts completely, their experiences with one another allow them to change and accept one another.

In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Waverly Jong is a dynamic character who shows her arrogance, selfishness and insecurities as the story progresses. On the first letter of Waverly’s name, W, sits a Mink, which symbolizes her desire for her mother’s approval. Throughout the novel, Waverly avoids Lindo’s criticism and fears her mother will not agree with her choices. This is evident in “Four Directions” when Waverly shows her mother the mink coat Rich bought her and Lindo responds, “This is no good… It is just leftover strips. And the fur is too short” (Tan 186). Waverly is destroyed by her mother’s criticism. After Lindo points out the coat’s flaws, Waverly can no longer see the good in it; she only values the things her mother values. Next, the “a” is formed by a crab, symbolizing selfishness. During New Year’s dinner at the Woo house, Waverly takes the best three crabs for her family. She does not care that she is a guest or that Suyuan had not planned on Shoshana eating crabs, she takes the best for herself, showing her self-centered nature. After the “a,” the “v” is formed by two dolls, symbolizing her childhood and her love for her daughter. Contrasting her negative traits, Waverly’s unfaltering love for Shoshana shows that she is willing to sacrifice her successes for her daughter’s prosperity, demonstrating that she is not as selfish as she is portrayed. A red candle is embedded in the “e” to highlight Waverly’s ignorance. She believes she is all knowing but does not

The Joy Luck Club, a novel written by Amy Tan, portrays the journeys and relationships between eight Chinese mothers and daughters. Lindo Jong, one of the four mothers from the novel, is betrothed to a boy named Huang Tyan-Yu when she is two years old. From then on, Lindo’s mother trains her to be a good housewife for her future family. When Lindo is twelve years old, her house gets flooded and consequently, Lindo’s mother forces Lindo to live with her husband’s family. Eventually, Lindo learns how to be a “proper” housewife under the commandment of Tyan-Yu’s mother, Huang Taitai. Lindo’s journey fits Joseph Campbell’s model of a “hero’s journey.” In The Hero’s Adventure, Joseph Campbell, a mythologist, divides a hero’s journey into three stages: the departure, fulfillment, and return. The departure initiates from something being lost or entering a “dark forest” (4), the fulfillment consists of trials that the hero must “have the courage to face” (4), and the return is accomplished by regaining what has been lost and bringing “a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience” (4). Therefore, Lindo is a hero due to her departure from freedom, fulfillment through various trials presented by the Huang household, and return through her transformation and regainment of freedom and self.

To begin with, The Joy Luck Club centers its content around the lives of eight women of Chinese heritage each with their own stories to tell; yet, all striving to satisfy their aspirations in America. A concise cross is common between the mothers’ hopes compared to those of the American born daughters. Immigrating to America for various reasons, the four mothers all had one goal in mind, to not only construct themselves a better life, but also ensure the finest future for their daughters. For the mothers in the Joy Luck Club, the American dream was to instill Chinese history, heritage, and habit in their daughters while providing American opportunities of growth, gratification, and gallantry. Carrying heavy pasts, the four original American Joy Luck Club members arrived in The United States to start anew, “America was where

    Amy Tan's immensely popular novel, The Joy Luck Club explores the issues faced by first and second generation Chinese immigrants, particularly mothers and daughters. Although Tan's book is a work of fiction, many of the struggles it describes are echoed in Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographical work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The pairs of mothers and daughters in both of these books find themselves separated along both cultural and generational lines. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs, and geographic loyalty. The gulf between these women is sadly acknowledged by Ying-ying St. Clair when she says of

This article was written by Amy Tan, who is an English major and an author. Tan originally spoke about this topic at a group discussion about her book, The Joy Luck Club and later turned it into an essay for The Threepenny Review. She wrote this article to explain to writers everywhere that there are many different styles of English and that even someone who has majored in English and has published works can speak unconventional English. In “Mother Tongue” from The WakeTech Reader, Amy Tan (1989) examines the different versions of English that she finds herself using in different situations as well as the English her mother uses and how her mother’s version of English has a major impact on the way her mother is treated by strangers.