In the movie “The Joy Luck Club”, the relationship between Waverly and Auntie Lindo reminded me of the relationship between my mother and I. As a child of Haitian immigrants, this movie brought back memories of my younger years. I am the youngest of three siblings so as a child, I would always hear the lectures that my parents would give to my older siblings. Eventually, after hearing these constant lectures, certain topics stayed ingrained in my mind. I would always try to stay away from trouble and stay focused on school to appease my parents, especially my mother. In that sense, it reminded me of Auntie Lindo and Waverly. At a young age, Waverly was considered a chess prodigy. I wouldn’t consider myself as a prodigy by any means but, I wasn’t …show more content…
I still remember sitting in the library at 8:30 at night in the individual study room trying to differentiate between “there” and “their”. I would come from school and television wasn’t an option, I would have flashcards and books to read. I would love when my mother would come home late from work because it gave me extra time to hide my video game console in the spot she usually hides it in. I believe that’s where my stubbornness with education came to fruition. I stopped taking school seriously just like how Waverly stubbornly gave up on chess. Even though my grades weren’t as good as it used to be entering high school, my mother continued with her day not caring. Then that third quarter into sophomore year, I realized that I was better than my GPA identified me as. I knew to bring my GPA up I would have to take AP and honors courses for the rest of my time in high school. The same as when Waverly realized that dropping what’s important to her doesn’t necessarily affect her mother but, it affects her the most. Even though my mother may not know it, her not caring drove me to aim for the highest grades. I believed that I could do it all by myself. . In the end, I know that mother wants the best for
Pashtana said she would rather die than not go to school and acted on her words. Her education is limited and she doesn’t have all the recourses to make school easier, yet she still loves and wants all the knowledge she can get. While I sit in my three story private school, a clean uniform free of holes or loose seams, my macbook air in my lap, the smell of cookies rising up from the cafeteria, wishing to be anywhere else but there. No one has beat me because I want to go to school, no one has forced me into a marriage, I’ve never put my life in jeopardy for the sake of education. Pashtana’s life and choices made me take a moment to stop and reflect on my own life and how fortunate I am to have what I have.
Traditions, heritage and culture are three of the most important aspects of Chinese culture. Passed down from mother to daughter, these traditions are expected to carry on for years to come. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, daughters Waverly, Lena, Rose and June thoughts about their culture are congested by Americanization while on their quests towards self-actualization. Each daughter struggles to find balance between Chinese heritage and American values through marriage and professional careers.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a novel that deals with many controversial issues. These issues unfold in her stories about four Chinese mothers and their American raised daughters. The novel begins with the mothers talking about their own childhood’s and the relationship that they had with their mothers. Then it focuses on the daughters and how they were raised, then to the daughters current lives, and finally back to the mothers who finish their stories. Tan uses these mother-daughter relationships to describe conflicts of history, culture, and identity and how each of these themes are intertwined with one another through the mothers and daughters.
A good mother-daughter relationship is beneficial for both the mother and the daughter. This definitely comes into play in Amy Tan’s novel titled “The Joy Luck Club.” The story is about four sets of Chinese mothers and daughters, and their first experience of growing in America. All of the mothers want to raise their children in the traditional Chinese way and still allow them to be all that they can be in America. This causes many conflicts between them when the daughters act too American and the mothers act too Chinese. There are also problems when some of the daughters grow and get married to American Men. The mothers influence the daughters with stories of ancestors and eventually the daughters learn that their mothers really do know what they are talking about. Each mother shows their love to their daughter in a different way, and the daughters usually respond to it in a negative manner. There is a lack of communication between the mothers and daughters, which leave a lot of open space for assuming. The daughters seem to inherit a lot of their mother’s characteristics as they get older without even meaning to. In some cases they appear to mirror their mothers. It is as if everything that they have fought against for many years has become them.
Growing up, my parents never expected perfection but expected that I try to accomplish my best. The effort I’ve put forth in learning has been reflected in my grades throughout my high school career. I’ve entered myself in vigorous course work such as AP Government and AP English to become well prepared for my college career, all while maintaining a 4.4 grade point average this year. Not only do I engage in AP classes, but up until this year I had no study halls. I wanted my day to be packed full of interesting classes that I would enjoy learning about. My grades and choice of classes prove the effort that I put forth in my learning. Working hard now can only pay off in the future. Learning now creates a well-rounded human being. Working to learn is why I am so dedicated to my studies now.
The struggle with conflict between parents and children is something that almost always occurs to teens, especially those who drift into a culture outside of their parents’. In “Two Kinds,” by Amy Tan, an excerpt from The Joy Luck Club is an example of constant conflict between a strict and overbearing parent, and their child. The main character is a young Chinese- American daughter, whose childhood was affected by her overbearing Chinese mother. Throughout the whole story, Jing Mei and her mother had a numerous amount of conflict, which escorted to the central conflict. Jing Mei and her mother are like an apple and oranges, her mother is an imperious and an overbearing Chinese mother.
The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, is a book that compiles stories of the lives of Chinese women that were raised in China and became American citizens. These women formed the “Joy Luck Club,” which was a small group that discussed their homeland and troubles, but still enjoying the treasures of food and each other’s company. Each section of the book is written from the point of view of the character. The book continues on with the stories of these women’s daughters, telling stories of their lives being raised by mothers who were immigrants, and dissolving into American society. Chinese mothers try to pass on their values, instincts, and intuitiveness on to the second generation. Great fortune has come to the members of the Joy Luck Club through their hardships, and they only want their daughters to understand what it takes to succeed in life.
Parents always want what is best for their children, regardless of culture or ethnicity. In The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, and in “Life With Father” by Itabari Njeri, the parents express their parental methods upon their daughters. Children will all react differently to their parent’s methods, as do Waverly, June, and Itabari, but they still share a common resentment for their parents. It is shown in the two stories how parental methods expressed to children can be misinterpreted, thus influencing the child’s behavior.
During my years in high school, I have learned many valuable lessons. I’m proud of the person I am becoming. Life has not been easy, but thankfully I’m a strong hard worker. I started high school with a high GPA, and never intended for it to drop throughout my years. Within the last three years, I’ve moved around, participated in sports, and got a job.
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.
Waverly grew up “as the Great American Hope, a child prodigy and a girl to boot” (Tan 97). Waverly couldn’t do anything except practice chess. She got into chess because “Vincent got the chess set, which would have been a very decent present to get at a church Christmas party, except it was obviously used, as we discovered later, it was missing q black pawn and white knight” (Tan 93). Waverly was so determined to play chess that she “read the rules and looked up the big words in a dictionary…. borrowed books from the Chinatown library….
Many women find that their mothers have the greatest influence on their lives and the way their strengths and weaknesses come together. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters are followed through vignettes about their upbringings and interactions. One of the mothers, An-Mei Hsu, grows up away from her mother who has become the 4th wife of a rich man; An-Mei is forced to live with her grandmother once her mother is banned from the house, but eventually reunites and goes to live in the man’s house with her mother. Her daughter, Rose, has married an American man, Ted, but their marriage begins to end as he files for divorce; Rose becomes depressed and unsure what to do, despite her mother’s advice. An-Mei has strengths and weaknesses that shape her own courageous actions, and ultimately have an influence on her daughter.
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 ...
In the Joy Luck Club, each mother-daughter relationship revealed key aspects that shaped their overall bond. One of the most common issue that was seen involved the issue of the daughters being too assimilated into the American culture to the point where their Chinese traditions and roots were completely ignored. The mothers feared that their daughters do not understand important customs of their Chinese background due to being raised the “American” way. Even though the daughters chose to make their own decisions, the mothers took some of the blame for their daughters not being informed about their Chinese heritage. For example, Waverly and her mother, Lindo Jong, experienced various conflicting issues between their American and Chinese backgrounds.
Amy Tan in her novel The Joy Luck Club presents us with daughters who are striving to place themselves beyond the control of strong mothers and become individuals. Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born calls this splitting from the mother, "matraphobia" (Rich, 235), and later notes: "The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mothers; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins we perform radical surgery." (Rich, 236) Tan shows us two characters in her novel who consciously split from their mother when they feel unable to claim their true selves. These two characters are Waverly Jong and Jing-mei Woo.