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The joy luck club mother and daughter relationships
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The joy luck club mother and daughter relationships
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Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club 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 represent everything that was hoped for in their daughters, the mothers wanted them to have a “swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” (3). This swan was all of the mothers’ good intentions. However, when they got to America, the swan was taken away and all she had left was one feather. America was not everything the mothers had expected for their daughters. The mothers always wanted to give their daughters the feather to tell of their hardships, but they never could. They wanted to wait until the day that they could speak perfect American English. However, they never learned to speak their language, which prevented them from communicating with their daughters. All the mothers in The Joy Luck Club had so much hope for their daughters in America, but instead their lives ended up mirroring their mother’s life in China. All the relationships had many hardships because of miscommunication from their different cultures. As they grew older the children realized that their ... ... middle of paper ... ... and in her hurry to get away, she (falls) before she even reach(s) the corner,” (87). This foreshadows the relationship between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club. The daughters can not understand the reasoning behind their mothers’ decisions. However, the mothers realize their daughters are so much like them and they do not want this to happen. The daughters grow up being “Americanized,” but as they grow older they begin to want to understand their Chinese culture. All of the characters learned many valuable lessons that will be passed on to their own children. Work Cited Chinese-American Women in American Culture. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~tdo/ea/chinese.html Roella. http://members.tripod.com/~Roella/AmyTan/ Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York. Ivy Books. 1989. Tavernise, Peter. http://www.mindspring.com/~petert/tan.htm
In his article, “To Be Patriotic is to Build Socialsim”: Communist Ideology in Vietnam's Civil War, Tuong Vo challenges a standard view of the civil war between North and South Vietnam – the war is power struggle between the two camps. Based on a newly availble documents and other primary sources, Vu argues that “[V]ietnamese communists never wavered in their ideology loyalty during the period when key decisions about the civil war were made (1953–1960).....a modernizing socialist idology rather than a mere for national unification was driving the Vietnamese civil war from the north” (Vu 2009, 34–35).
Lewicki, J. R., Barry, B., & Saunders, M. D. (2011). Essentials of negotiation (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill. ISBN-13: 9780073530369
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.
In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, four Chinese born mothers and their four American born daughters tell stories from their own point of view about their relationships with one another. These four mothers demonstrate the finest parenting by trying to keep their heritage alive and educate their daughters, while being immigrants. Through the mothers' actions, they are able to teach and influence their daughters about their Chinese heritage, about everyday life and situations, and how to stand up for themselves all while being in an overwhelming American society.
The movie, The Joy Luck Club, focuses around the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters. The story takes place a few months after Junes mother, Suyuan has died. The mothers and daughters hold very different principles, where the mothers are still very traditional to their Chinese upbringings the daughters are much more “American.” The movie can be viewed from the Feminist Literary Theory, since the 8 main characters are female. The women’s life stories are told through a series of flashback scenes that deal heavily with female gender roles and the expectations of women. While the mothers and their daughter grew up in vastly different worlds, some of their experiences and circumstances correlate solely due to that fact that they experienced them because they are females.
The Joy Luck Club is the telling of a tale of struggle by four mothers and their four daughters trying to understand the issue of gender identity, how they each discover or lose their sense of self and what they mean to one another. Throughout the book each of the mothers works hard at teaching their daughters the virtues of Chinese wisdom while allowing the opportunities of American life. They try passing on a piece of themselves despite the great barriers that are built between the women. Each of the stories gives a wonderful glimpse into the Chinese culture and heritage that the mothers are trying to reveal to their daughters through the use of festivals, food dishes, marriage ceremonies, and the raising of children, essentially their past experiences.
In Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream one finds the typical use of love and nature that is evidence of Shakespeare’s youth and experimentation. He creates in this play another world, a fairy world where Puck is the ringleader and love is everywhere. Called "fancy’s child" by Milton, Shakespeare brings out his cheerful happiness in its most light-hearted manner in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Vietnamese communists, in addition to Hồ, were staunch believers in their goal of attaining independence. They were adamant in opposing the French and any other force who worked against them, including the Americans. The communists abided by a common ideology, making it much easier for them to build a common identity, using universality and community as backdrops to their desire for independence. With conformity and individual sacrifices for the greater benefit of the nation in mind, the communists’ influence on the minds of the people was evident. They were able to reach out to those who were long forgotten by the South Vietnamese regime:
Through out time tragedy has been occurring. It is seen in our everyday lives and has been portrayed in writings, plays, and movies and within those tragedies there is a tragic hero. When the word hero come to mind people tend to think of someone like Superman or Batman, someone courageous and has heroic quality, performing heroic deeds. But a tragic hero could not be farther from that. A tragic hero is usually someone of high status or a member of royalty. They have a tragic flaw or personal weakness that lead to their downfall. The idea of a tragic hero comes from ancient greek plays, which were developed from their religious stories. Many of these play were written by Sophocles; an ancient greek playwright. Sophocles’ work mostly consisted of tragedies, Aristotle - a Greek philosopher - observed Sophocles’ plays and defined tragedy and tragic hero. In the play Antigone by Sophocles, the headstrong King Creon is the tragic hero. His stubbornness and his concern of what other think of him leads to his disgrace. Whereas in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare The honorable Brutus is the tragic hero. Brutus’ honesty and being overly trusting leads to his demise. In these two plays the tragic hero are very different, but they are both still considered tragic heros. They both have tragic flaws, but Brutus is still considered a integrable man inspite of his flaw, whereas Creon is considered to be dishonourable by his flaw. Both Brutus and Creon stood up for what they believed was but right but Brutus is the most tragic of the two.
Ho Chi Minh was willing to counter French colonialism in a very aggressive, militaristic manner. A nationalist, a Leninist, and a Marxist, Ho despised capitalism and adopted socialist and communist ideas. He despised French imperialism and seethed with revolution. A true leader, Ho Chi Minh knew how to rally his people behind him and the national cause. He cried to his nation in 1941, “If our entire people are solidly united we can certainly get the better of the best-trained armies of the French and the Japanese… National salvation is the common cause of our entire people. Every Vietnamese must take part in it. He who has money will contribute his money, he who has strength will contribute his strength, he who has talent will contribute talent. For my part I pledge to follow in your steps and devote all my modest abilities to the service of the country and am ready for the supreme sacrifice” (Hunt 12). Ho led with skill and competence; he “showed a remarkable ideological flexibility and tactical genius that enabled him to succeed where earlier nationalists had failed” (Lawrence 17). He had a knack to “seamlessly [blend] communist notions of social revolution with nationalist themes likely to resonate with a broad range of Vietnamese motivated
Oftentimes the children of immigrants to the United States lose the sense of cultural background in which their parents had tried so desperately to instill within them. According to Walter Shear, “It is an unseen terror that runs through both the distinct social spectrum experienced by the mothers in China and the lack of such social definition in the daughters’ lives.” This “unseen terror” is portrayed in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as four Chinese women and their American-born daughters struggle to understand one another’s culture and values. The second-generation women in The Joy Luck Club prove to lose their sense of Chinese values, becoming Americanized.
Morton, O. (2004). Ice station vostok: Fast track to the moons of jupiter - and the key to life on earth - is a prehistoric lake nearly three miles beneath the antarctic ice cap. Wired, 7(12), Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/vostok_pr.html
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 between cultures create rifts between mothers and daughters.
In The Joy Luck Club, the novel traces the fate of the four mothers-Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair-and their four daughters-June Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. Through the experiences that these characters go through, they become women. The mothers all fled China in the 1940's and they all retain much of their heritage. Their heritage focuses on what is means to be a female, but more importantly what it means to be an Asian female.
Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club describes the lives of first and second generation Chinese families, particularly mothers and daughters. Surprisingly The Joy Luck Club and, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts are very similar. They both talk of mothers and daughters in these books and try to find themselves culturally. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs.