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What is not clear in joy luck club Amy Tan
What is not clear in joy luck club Amy Tan
What is not clear in joy luck club Amy Tan
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Diagnostic Writing Assessment
A healthy mother-daughter relationship is very important. This is proven in Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom and Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club. Even though the books have a similar theme, they are completely different. Amy Chua’s memoir has a frustrating but positive tone, while Amy Tan’s novel has a hateful, bitter, and negative tone. In the excerpt from “The Violin” from the Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom, Amy Chua has a positive, healthy relationship with her daughter. Chua only wants the best for her daughter but brings it across in a way that frustrates her daughter. It is ironic that Amy Chua yells ”RELAX!”, which is making her daughter Lulu uneasy and irritable, when the key to being successful at playing the violin is being relaxed (Chua 47-48). Amy Chua is trying her best to support what Lulu’s violin teacher instructed her to do but the presence of Chua is making Lulu edgy. Lulu gets frustrated and blurts out,”‘Stop it, Mommy. Just stop it’”(Chua 47-48). This shows that they have a positive mother-daughter relationship that is strained by the
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The novel is written from the daughter's perspective and the excerpt reveals the relationship Amy Tan has with her mother. She uses a distant, hateful, and bitter tone to illustrate the negative and tense relationship they have. Amy Tan calls her mother, mother which shows the distance between them. For Tan’s mother there is only one kind of daughter. She is forcing Tan to be something she is not and that comes back to haunt her when Tan screams, “‘Then I wish I’d never been born!’ I shouted. ‘I wish I were dead! Like them’”(Tan 141-142). Tan knew that by saying this it would hurt her mother deeply. She wanted exactly that to get revenge on her mother for treating her the way she did. The two have a bitter, hateful mother-daughter relationship that is an ongoing issue between
Mothers always want the best for their daughters, it’s a given feeling for a mother. Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom is written in her perspective as the mother. In The Joy Luck Club, Amy tan writes the novel through her eyes as the daughter of the relationship. Both passages portray the harsh emotions between the mother and her daughter. These emotions are caused by the mother pressuring her daughter to achieve expectations. The two excerpts have similar stressful tones but Amy Tan’s novel is much more intense and displays a uglier relationship.
The mother and daughter have a very distant relationship because her mother is ill and not capable to be there, the mother wishes she could be but is physically unable. “I only remember my mother walking one time. She walked me to kindergarten." (Fein). The daughter’s point of view of her mother changes by having a child herself. In the short story the son has a mother that is willing to be helpful and there for him, but he does not take the time to care and listen to his mother, and the mother begins to get fed up with how Alfred behaves. "Be quiet don't speak to me, you've disgraced me again and again."(Callaghan). Another difference is the maturity level the son is a teenager that left school and is a trouble maker. The daughter is an adult who is reflecting back on her childhood by the feeling of being cheated in life, but sees in the end her mother was the one who was truly being cheated. “I may never understand why some of us are cheated in life. I only know, from this perspective, that I am not the one who was.” (Fein). The differences in the essay and short story show how the children do not realize how much their mothers care and love
...ther is losing her daughter to time and circumstance. The mother can no longer apply the word “my” when referring to the daughter for the daughter has become her own person. This realization is a frightening one to the mother who then quickly dives back into her surreal vision of the daughter now being a new enemy in a world already filled with evils. In this way it is easier for the mother to acknowledge the daughter as a threat rather than a loss. However, this is an issue that Olds has carefully layered beneath images of war, weapons, and haircuts.
The Joy Luck Club is a representation of the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between mother and daughter in a Chinese American society. The book illustrates the hardships both the mother and daughters go through in order to please the other. Also, it shows the troubles the daughters face when growing up in two cultures. This book reveals that most of the time mothers really do know best.
Throughout the novel, The Joy Luck Club, author Amy Tan explores the issues of tradition and change and the impact they have on the bond between mothers and daughters. The theme is developed through eight women that tell their separate stories, which meld into four pairs of mother-daughter relationships.
Within The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, by Amy Chua and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, two unique mother-daughter relationships are portrayed. Every mother and daughter relationship varies. In Amy Chua’s The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, a different situation is shown than Amy Tan’s experience in The Joy Luck Club. Although each work displays a different scenario, they both involve the contradiction of mother-daughter relationships.
Tan uses a simile to describe the resemblance in the circumstances that the four mothers and their daughter face. For example, “... she still came out the same way. Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was a girl. And i was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.”(Tan 215). Tan’s use of language in this quote, explains the connection between mother and daughter, and the stories told between them. Also, the mothers see their own mistakes and flaws in their daughters, and hope to prevent these daughters from suffering the same way they did.
Amy Tan, in ?Mother Tongue,? Does an excellent job at fully explaining her self through many different ways. It?s not hard to see the compassion and love she has for her mother and for her work. I do feel that her mother could have improved the situation of parents and children switching rolls, but she did the best she could, especially given the circumstances she was under. All in all, Amy just really wanted to be respected by her critics and given the chance to prove who she is. Her time came, and she successfully accomplished her goals. The only person who really means something to her is her mother, and her mother?s reaction to her first finished work will always stay with her, ?so easy to read? (39).
Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club 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.
However, the themes and struggles presented in her fiction as well as her characters represent the experiences of many Asian-American writers and individuals experience and do address their need to construct an identity that includes both Asian and American cultural ideals. Tan's mothers and daughters experience and strive to attain what Asian- Americans such as myself work hard to achieve. Rather than simply presenting situations involving cultural tension. Amy Tan, through oral and mythical connections to the Chinese and American cultures, gives readers a glimpse into an Asian-American mythology, a culture comprised of two separate, often opposing ideals. This is not to say that anyone not of Asian descent can enjoy her fiction. Rather, the mythical element of Tan's novels allows anyone of any culture to connect to her characters, to notice real-life situations in her novels and see how the characters resolve cultural and familial conflicts. In The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, Amy Tan uses stories from her own history and myth to explore the voices of mothers and daughters of Chinese ancestry. Each woman tells a story indicative of the uniqueness of her voice. In Tan’s fiction, the daughters’ sense of self is intricately linked to an ability to speak and be heard by their mothers. Similarly, the mothers experience
In The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, the characters Suyuan and June have a mother-daughter relationship fraught with conflict, but ultimately rooted in deep love and commitment for one another. Because of drastic differences in the environments in which they were raised and in their life experiences, these two women have many opposing ideas and beliefs. This coupled with their lack of communication are responsible for many of the problems they encounter during the course of their relationship. These conflicts are only resolved when June learns about her mother's past and accepts their respective differences. The manner in which their relationship develops and the conflicts June and Suyuan face reveal some of the themes that Amy Tan intends for the readers to learn. These themes concern such topics as finding life's importance, making choices, and understanding ourselves and our families.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a brilliant heart-wrenching novel. Prior to this course, I’ve never read the full book only the two stories “A Pair of Tickets” and “Two Kinds”. However, I am glad I had the opportunity to read the book in its entirety. Naturally, based off the two stories I’ve read I was biased in a way towards Suyuan. I originally sided with her daughter until I seen things from the viewpoint of the other mothers who are also Chinese. Nonetheless, If I had to recommend one book that portrays mother-daughter relationships this will be the book. While reading the novel I found myself gravitating towards each character for who I was drawn to for different reasons. The characters, their individual life stories, their pain was realistic
The mother-daughter relationship is often complex and confusing. Amy Tan explores this relationship with novel The Joy Luck Club narrated by four daughters and three mothers: Jing-mei Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Lena St. Clair, Waverly Jong, An-mei Jordan, Ying-Ying St. Clair, and Lindo Jong. June narrates in her late mother's place. The mothers talk about their difficult pasts in China and how they have been changed. The trauma from their past causes their daughters not to be able to connect to . The women are finally able to connect to each other. The women are forced to learn from the past, overcome adversity, and learn to understand one another.
Tan succeeds in her use of pathos as she manages to make her mother seem helpless. This is quite a feat, as her obvious strengths have already been displayed in situations such as when yelling at the stockbroker. Tan supports her depiction of her mother as a victim by bringing up how people “did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.” (37)
The Joy Luck Club is a representation of the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between mother and daughter in a Chinese American society and is written by Amy Tan. The book illustrates the hardships both the mother and daughters go through in order to please the other. Also, it shows the troubles the daughters face when growing up in two cultures. This book reveals that most of the time mothers really do know best. Throughout all of the Jing-Mei Woo stories, June has to recall all of the memories of what her mother had told her. She remembers how her mother left her babies during the war. Junes mother felt that since she had failed as a mother to her first babies she had failed as a person. When she made June take piano lessons June thought that she was trying to make her become a child prodigy like Waverly, but her mother did this because she knew it would benefit June for the rest of her life. Because of the death of her mother, June was forced to take the place of her mother in more than just filling her place at the Maj Jong table. The mother daughter tradition was broken because the lost babies were found after the death of their mother. Junes trip to China can be seen as the completion of her mothers promise to return, honoring her sisters by attempting to transfer what she had absorbed from her mother and her tradition. And I think, My mother is right.