The Joy Luck Club
In The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan’s first novel, short-story-like vignettes alternate
back and forth between the lives of four Chinese women in pre-1949 China and lives of
their American-born daughters in California. The book is a mediation on the divided
nature of this emigrant life. The novel is narrated horizontally as well as vertically;
friendships and rivalries develop among the daughters as well as the mothers.(Matuz 92) As Jing Mei Woo describes, “Auntie Lin and my mother were both best friends and
arch-enemies who spent a lifetime comparing their children. I was one month older than
Waverly Jong, Auntie Lin’s prized daughter. From the time we were babies, our mothers compared the creases in our belly buttons, how shapely our earlobes were, how fast we healed when we scraped our knees, how thick and dark our hair was, how many shoes we wore out in one year, and later, how smart Waverly was at playing chess, how many trophies she had won last month, how many newspapers had printed her name, how many cities she had visited.” (95) In Amy Tan’s novel she shows that the bond between a
family is the strongest bond between any type of people.
Tan has written a novel without a central plot but with characters and events that are as powerful as myth, and which often entangle it. The stories of the aunties are interspersed with events involving the daughters, so that China and America come
together in fantastic and unconnected succession. Tan lets each woman tell her own
story; at the center of each tale is the ferocious love between a mother and daughter. (89)
“ Even though I taught my daughter the opposite, she still came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born 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 92)
Born in Oakland, California, in 1952 to a father educated as an engineer in
Beijing and a mother raised in a well-to-do Shanghai family, Amy Tan grew up in an
American world that was far from the childhood world of her parents. (Matuz 92)
When pollsters ask people what is most important to happiness, the overwhelming
majority give the same response: a good family life. Most individuals need the care,
comfort, and securit...
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...emphasizes the significance of the emotional relation and commitment to children. (Shannon 44)
The Joy Luck Club is a book about relationships between families. The book
portrays how families stick together between hard times and how the bond they share
always stands strong.
Work Cited Page
1. Blankenhorn, David. Fatherless in America. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
2. Bloomingdale, Teresa. Up a Family Tree. New York: Doubleday and company, 1981.
3. Bombeck, Erma. Motherhood, The Second Oldest Profession. New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, 1983.
4. Bluestein, Jane. Parents Teens and Boundaries. Florida: Health communication, 1993.
5. The Editors of Time-Life Books. Family Ties. Virginia: Time Life Books, 1987.
6. Matuz, Roger. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Detroit: Gale Research Inc, 1989.
7. Ryder, Verdene. Parents and Their Children. Illinois: The Goodheart-Willcox
company, 1985.
8. Shannon, Thomas. Surrogate Motherhood. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company,
1988.
9. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
10. Worth, Richard. The American Family. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.
...da’s, Christine’s, and Rayona’s individual stories” (Roby64). Their stories correlate with each other which keep them together in a bond so strong they themselves can not separate. Ida ends the novel with a stunning statement about their stories calling their lives, “three strands, the whispers of coming and going, of twisting and tying and bending, of catching and of letting go, of braiding”(Dorris372).
Characters in a book not only tell the story, but teach the reader a lesson. To Kill a Mockingbird is a book that exhibits racism and gives the readers a taste of what it was like in the 1930’s. One of the several major characters of this book is Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout. She matured greatly because of women characters such as Miss Maudie, Calpurnia, and her Aunt Alexandra. In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout teaches all readers the lesson of how it is important to have a motherly figure in your life; she does so through possessing the traits of being curious, tomboy, and hot tempered.
June-May fulfills her mother’s name and life goal, her long-cherished wish. She finally meets her twin sisters and in an essence fulfills and reunites her mother with her daughter through her. For when they are all together they are one; they are their mother. It is here that June-May fulfills the family portion of her Chinese culture of family. In addition, she fully embraces herself as Chinese. She realizes that family is made out of love and that family is the key to being Chinese. “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.” (Tan 159). Finally, her mother’s life burden is lifted and June-May’s doubts of being Chinese are set aside or as she says “After all these years, it can finally be let go,” (Tan 159).
Atticus's battle for justice causes more problems for Scout. She is continually defending him but the racist remarks do not stop. These remarks just show how cruel children can be to other children. She feels the need to defend her father to Francis, her cousin. He was also taunting her with accusations: "At a safe distance her called, `He's nothin' but a nigger-lover'." The benign force of racism has disrupted their lives, especially Scouts, through the old fashioned and discriminative opinions of the younger residents of Maycomb.
All through time, successive generations have rebelled against the values and traditions of their elders. In all countries, including China, new generations have sought to find a different path than that of their past leaders. Traditional values become outdated and are replaced with what the younger society deems as significant. Family concentrates on this very subject. In the novel, three brothers struggle against the outdated Confucian values of their elders. Alike in their dislike of the traditional Confucian system of their grandfather, yet very different in their interactions with him and others, begin to reach beyond the ancient values of Confucianism and strive for a breath of freedom. Their struggles against the old values lead to pain, suffering and eventually achievement for the three of them, however at a harsh price for two brothers.
Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird portrayed an era of extreme prejudice and ignorance. Throughout the novel, these specific characteristics were noticed in the behavior of Maycomb’s residents, especially during the trial of Tom Robinson – a highly publicized court case involving a black man convicted of raping a white girl from a despicable family. Although it became obvious throughout the trial that Robinson was innocent, and the girl’s father was the real culprit, Tom Robinson was convicted mainly due to social prejudice toward his race. The unjust result of this trial deeply disturbed the main characters of the novel: Scout and Jem, the children of the defense attorney of the trial, Atticus Finch. Since the story took place in the 1930s, racism was still widely accepted in society, and most of the residents in Maycomb openly professed their derogatory views on people of a different race or social standard. Growing up in a family that believed in egalitarianism, Scout and Jem faced backlash from the community since their father was fighting for a black man in the Tom Robinson trial. Amid these two highly conflicting environments, Scout and Jem had many unanswered questions and no support in the community during these tough times. Additionally, the Maycomb community was plagued with injustice due to discrimination and racism. However, there was one character in the novel who remained open-minded and unprejudiced even in the face of tradition and communal ignorance. A close neighbor of the Finch’s, who shared the same moral views as Atticus, Miss Maudie served as a mother figure to young Scout and Jem, who were going through a tough time in the community. Although Miss Maudie may not have had enough power to change the prejudice...
The differences in social class and distaste between the blacks and the whites are clear in the small town of Maycomb. So clear that most of the town’s children are quickly catching on. This racial discrimination is also known as ‘Maycomb’s disease.’ When the news had gone around town about Atticus fighting for Tom Robinson, the disease got even worse. Children at school were taunting Scout telling her Atticus is a “nigger lover”. It wasn’t until Atticus said “It's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you.” (Lee, 108) that Scout realized how discriminatory those people were. She also experiences this at Calpurnia’s church when Lula tells Calpurnia "You ain't got no business bringin' white chillun here—they got their church, we got our'n. It is our church, ain't it, Miss Cal?" (119) This is where Scout’s shift of view begins as an adult problem begins disrupting her little happy world and she realizes she can’t do much about it.
Amy Tan's "A Pair of Tickets," especially, explores the relationship of setting to place, heritage, and ethnic identity. Jing-Mei Woo, the main character, has trouble accepting that she is Chinese, despite her heritage. Jing-Mei Woo believed, at fifteen, that she had no Chinese whatsoever below her skin. If anything, she perceives herself as Caucasian; even her Caucasian friends agreed that she "was as Chinese as they were." Her mother, however, told her differently, "It's in your blood, waiting to be let go." This terrified Jing-Mei, making her believe that it would cause her to suddenly change, "I saw myself transforming like a werewolf." Jing-Mei Woo finally realizes that she has never really known what it means to be Chinese because she was born and has lived in America all her life. After her mother's death, Jing-Mei discovers that she has two twin sisters living in China who have been searching for their mother and that s...
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.
Growing up in Maycomb, Southern Alabama in the 1930s was not an easy thing. Amid a town of prejudice and racism, stood a lone house where equality and respect for all gleamed like a shining star amid an empty space. The house of Atticus Finch was that shining star. Jean Louise Finch, also known as “Scout”, is given the opportunity of being raised in this house by her father, Atticus. I stole this essay from the net. As she grows, Atticus passes down his values of equality and righteousness to Scout and her brother Jeremy Atticus Finch, also known as “Jem”. In “To Kill a Mockingbird”, by Harper Lee, we see Scout learns many lessons about dealing with prejudice by observing the behavior of other characters in the story.
Based on Deconstruction theory, Lan Cao’s novel Monkey Bridge depicts the mother-daughter relationship before and after living in exile in terms of language, familial roles and deception.
A small city nestled in the state of Alabama, Maycomb has got its faults, just like any other place in the world, but one of its main faults or (pg.88) “Maycomb's usual disease,” as Atticus calls it in the book is prejudice. Jem and Scout learn a lot about prejudice when a black man named Tom Robinson is accused of raping a white woman named Mayella Ewell and their father, Atticus, is called on to be his lawyer. They realize the hate that people have buried deep within their heart when they see a black man accused of doing something only because of his color. On pg.241, Scout starts understanding this and thinks, “Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.” As the case continues, up until the death of Tom Robinson, Jem and Scout learn more and more about prejudice and how the hate that people have towards others causes them to take wrong actions. They also see how unfair it is that a white man can get treated better and think of himself better than a black man only because he was born white. This prejudice and the trial cause Jem and Scout to get in argum...
Tan was born to a pair of Chinese immigrants. Her mother understood English extremely well, but the English she spoke was “broken.”(36) Many people not familiar with her way of speaking found it very difficult to understand her. As a result of this, Tan would have to pretend to be her mother, and she called people up to yell at them while her mother stood behind her and prompted her. This caused Tan to be ashamed of her mother throughout her youth, but as she grew, she realized that the language she shares with her mother is a “language of intimacy” (36) that she even uses when speaking with her husband.
In conclusion, Amy Tan uses many literary elements such as characterization, symbolism, and conflict to display the themes of independence and the battle within Waverly between her Chinese heritage and becoming Americanized. The characterization shows just how much young Waverly changes from beginning to end, and how she grows further and further from her family. The struggle between being an American and Chinese is portrayed with the symbolic properties of the good luck charm from her mother, the wind she hears while playing chess, and the game itself. By using the element of conflict, Tan shows the extent of the conflicts between the two cultures and ways of life, and also between Waverly and her mother.
The Soong sisters were very close to each other at the start of their lives, but always had distinctions between each other. In childhood, “…lively little Mei-ling wishe[d] she had been born a boy so she could ‘do things’. Sweet, shy Ching-ling astonishe[d] them all by the ardor of her determination to serve the revolution which [was] prophesied by her father and his friend, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Clever, capable Ai-ling [was] looking forward to college”(Spencer 92).