Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, a famous novel about the relationship between two generations, mother and daughter. Tan is an American-Chinese woman, whose parents are both Chinese immigrants. In order to meet the high expectation of her mother, Tan had to go through many hardships. Around five years old, she already knew the taste of pressure when her mother was displeased at her just because her picture was not hanged in the Principal’s Office. Growing up in America, Tan also realizes the differences between two cultures. Tan would get scolded at when she received a B, while other children were okay when they got a C. Tan realizes it would be hard to appease her mother or even at all. Even so, Tan still tried hard to meet her mother’s expectation. However, Tan completely changed from an obedient daughter to a rebellious one because of one incident - the death of her father and brother. Because of this, Tan thought that there would be no use of being good; therefore, she started to rebel against her mother. “Anything that my mother hated, that was better” Tan said in an interview. She began to put on make-up, wear short skirts, smoke, drink, and date a 26 year old man, who her mother absolutely disapproved of. Her eccentric and rebellious behavior got to the point when she was almost placed in jail. Eventually, as she grew up, Tan began to forgive herself for her stupid mistakes and to also forgive her mother. Tan came to the realization that all her mother did was out of love; she just wanted Tan to have a bright future.
Amy Tan then began to write her first novel, The Joy Luck Club. This novel is both a major hit in her literary career and her life. One of the factors that led her to hold her pen up and write this ...
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No relationship is ever perfect no matter how great it seems. In the novel The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan, she tells the story of a few mother daughter pairs that are in a group named the Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club is a group of women who come together once a week to play mahjong. The founder of the Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo, dies, leaving her daughter Jing-mei to take her place in the club. Her daughter, Jing-mei, receives money from the other members of the club to travel to China in order to find her mother's twin daughters who were left many years ago. In this book you get more of the details of this family and a few more. Amy Tan uses the stories of Jing-mei and Suyuan, Waverly and Jindo, and An-mei and Rose to portray her theme of, mother daughter relationships can be hard at times but they are always worth it in the end.
Harmon, William, William Flint Thrall, Addison Hibbard, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. Print.
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.
In Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the character of An-mei learns to love and respect her mother. This essay will focus on the precise moment of the transformation of An-mei to a strong, self-confident woman.
The Joy Luck Club is an emotional tale about four women who saw life as they had seen it back in China. Because the Chinese were very stereotypic, women were treated as second class citizens and were often abused. Through sad and painful experiences, these four women had tried to raise their daughters to live the American dream by giving them love and support, such things which were not available to them when they were young. These women revealed their individual accounts in narrative form as they relived it in their memories. These flashbacks transport us to the minds of these women and we see the events occur through their eyes. There were many conflicts and misunderstandings between the two generations due to their differences in upbringing and childhood. In the end, however, these conflicts would bring mother and daughter together to form a bond that would last forever.
One function of a novel is to allow readers to gain insight on new perspectives. We expect that reading a novel will provide us with various perspectives and ideas to relate to our own realities. Throughout history, postmodernists have used literature to prove that an objective reality does not exist. Fictional books allow readers to connect to the characters more easily and therefore understand the various perspectives of characters. In her novel The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses defamiliarization to show the reader perspectives on America that they may be unaware of. Tan proves that there is no absolute reality of America and its culture. Ultimately, Tan successfully utilizes this technique to insight her audience of readers with new
When analyzing the Joy Luck club it is important to consider the life of the author. It is apparent after studying both The Joy Luck Club and Amy Tan that there are some incredible similarities among the two, particularly the story of mother Suyuan-Woo and her daughter Jing-Mei Woo. Suyuan is a main character and plays an extremely important role in the novel even though she passed away. She created the Joy Luck club years ago and is the main reason why this tight kit family exists today. Suyuan decided to create the Joy Luck club during a ve...
...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.
In the novel, The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, Ann-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying Ying St. Clair are all women who grow up in a traditional China, where there is sexism. They deal with serious problems that corrupt their lives. Through perseverance and the passing of time their lives return to normal.
Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club uses much characterization. Each character is portrayed in different yet similar ways. When she was raised, she would do whatever she could to please other people. She even “gave up her life for her parents promise” (49), I the story The Red Candle we get to see how Tan portrays Lindo Jong and how she is brought to life.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989, centers around love, family, and respect, while overcoming social inequalities. Tan is able to both fill hearts with joy for the good fortune and sorrow for the bad luck of eight Chinese women. Meeting together to play mah jong, raise money, and share stories, the idea of the joy luck club is created by Suyanne Woo, the late mother of June Woo. June is asked to fill her mother’s place at the fourth corner of the mah jong table, and listen to the secrets of her mother’s long forgotten life in China. As the stories unfold new symbols are discovered and new lessons are learned. The Joy Luck Club has opened new doors and inspired many with substantial influences in the areas of cuisine, art, and popular
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.
“I asked myself, What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person?” (1.3.53) Theme identity plays an important role in the novel as it focuses on the lives of Chinese-American daughters and their Chinese-born mothers. The novel is broken up into certain scenes told in different perspectives, as well, it examines the ups and downs of life in both the mothers and daughters. Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club has the daughters develop their understanding of their Chinese heritage, through their mother’s love, by learning about the past, and their cultural heritage;
Having slandered Alice Walker like that, this writer cannot overlook the fact that Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club does not convey a flattering view on men. While all of her male characters are minors ones at best, each one conveys a different distinct shortcoming. Harold, Lena’s husband, is completely oblivious to his wife’s feelings making him self-centered. After viewing the list of expenses on the refrigerator Lena’s mother and her had a discus...
Sadly, the characters revealed in The Joy Luck Club have personal histories so complicated by cultural and emotional misunderstandings that their lives are spent in failed attempts to cross the chasms created by these circumstances.