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 mothers all have stories of past struggles and hard times yet do not believe their daughters truly appreciate this fact. The mothers of the story all want their daughters to never have to go through the struggles they themselves had to go through, yet they are disappointed when their daughters grow up and do not exhibit the respect or strength of their mothers. This is the ironic paradox of the story.
The Chinese mothers came to the United States to escape the difficult life they led in China and to start fresh in the United States. They did not want their children to grow up as they had. The short story in the beginning of the book describes this feeling. “Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: “In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan – a creature that became more than what was hoped for.” Even though this is just a short story before the long one begins and is not actually attributed to any specific character in the story, I believe it accurately describes all the mothers’ feelings a…
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…tionships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife.” Women of Color: Mother Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. 207-27.
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East-West Values and the Mother-daughter Relationship in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
East-West Values and the Mother-daughter Relationship in The Joy Luck Club
The dominant theme of The Joy Luck Club is the clash between Chinese, American cultures, and how it affects the relationship between mothers and daughters. All of the mothers in the book were born and raised in China. All of their daughters were born and raised in the United States. Because of the differences in family traditions and values between the way the mothers had been raised in China and the way their daughters were growing up in America, there was bound to be a clash between the two generations. Perhaps the most dramatic example of how East-West conflicting traditions and values affected a mother-daughter relationship was that of Suyuan Woo and her daughter, Jing-mei.
When the book opens, Suyuan has been dead for two months. Her daughter, who prefers to call herself by the American name of “June” rather than her Chinese name, has been asked by her father to take her dead mother’s place. She was to take Suyuan’s place in a club Suyuan started when she moved to America. June was to be the fourth member of this club, which was hosted at one of the member’s homes each session and the group played mahjong and provided strength for each other in their transition to becoming Americanized. Over the course of the next few months, through the conversations and stories told by her mother’s old friends at the mahjong table, June learns a great deal about her mother, and, ultimately, about herself as well.
One of the conflicts between East and West is clash between the hard work ethic of Asian parents and the easier-going standards that Western parents have for their children. Watching a little Chinese girl playing the p…
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…5.
Heung, Marina. “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” Feminist Studies (Fall 1993): 597-616.
Hagedorn, Jessica. “Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck.” Signs of Life in the USA. 2nd. ed. Ed. Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon.
New York: Bedford, 1997. 306-14.
Huntley, E. D. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood P, 1998.
Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon, 1990.
Shear, Walter. “Generational differences and the diaspora in The Joy Luck Club.” Women Writers. 34.3 (Spring 1993): 193
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Vintage Contemporaries. New York: A Division of Random House, Inc., 1991..
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993