The Importance of History and Culture in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club The impact of history and culture on an individual's life is tremendous. History plays a large role in forming an individual because it helps them develop morals, ideals, and goals in life. It begins the process of finding an identity. The past is never forgotten because it leaves marks on ones life as a scar does to ones body. It may go unseen physically, but the emotional effects it produces last a lifetime, and can continue on for generations to come. The women in the novel, The Joy Luck Club, deal with all of the good and the bad that their history and culture have to offer. At times they experience difficulties because the mothers and daughters, although they are as one, share different cultures, while their history is the same. Ying-Ying St.Claire is the mother of Lena, who is a Chinese-American women. Lena and her mother don’t see eye to eye at all times because of the fact that they were raised in different cultures. Ying-Ying grew up in China in a very well-to-do family. At first she had very few worries, other than being obedient. Her Amah once told her, “You don’t need to understand. Just behave, follow your mothers example (Tan,66)”. As she grew older, she had to prepare for her future; a life of following future husbands orders and taking care of her husbands family. Chinese women would do this because it was expected of them. They would care for their husbands parents so that when they were old they would be taken care of as well. Ying-Ying learned everything, all of the lessons and life’s meanings, from her mother. Her mother learned everything that she knew from her own mother, as well as through experiences from her own... ... middle of paper ... ...all Chinese, and the daughters are Chinese-American. The mothers grew up in a more strict environment and followed the rules by the book. They were taught by their mothers, how to act, who they were, and what being Chinese meant. The daughters in this story grew up in a more relaxed world, where being an individual was accepted and appreciated. No one was punished for being themselves in America. For the women in this novel, finding their true identity was one of the most important things. By using their cultural background and discovering who their mothers were, they were able to find their true selves in the end as well giving them a complete sense of identity. Work Cited Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club, Ballantine Books, 1989 Thi Do, Thuan. “Chinese-American Women in American Culture”, available at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~tdo/ea/chinese.html, 1992.
Amy Tan 's novel, The Joy Luck Club, explores the relationships and experiences of four Chinese mothers with that of their four Chinese-American daughters. The differences in the upbringing of those women born around the 1920’s in China, and their daughters born in California in the 80’s, is undeniable. The relationships between the two are difficult due to lack of understanding and the considerable amount of barriers that exist between them.
One real problem was that with early aviation, the ability to see other aircraft while flying was limited and usually a last second visual. Another problem was that as aircraft were being built, there were no real safety standards that were required, when building them. As a result, planes were literally falling apart in the air because of developmental faults. With all these accidents happening, it was becoming apparent that there were problems that had to be corrected, which needed to involve the Federal Government.
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.
Is it fair to judge someone by their sex? In traditional Chinese culture, many judgments were made about a person just by observing their sex. The women was looked upon as an inferior being. They had little or no status in society, and little was expected from them. They were discriminated against when they tried to stand up for themselves. Chinese culture was customarily male dominated. The male was expected to do most of the work, and the woman was expected to stay at home with their mouth shut. This custom leaves an unwelcome feeling in a woman's heart. They feel like nobody cares, and it makes it much harder to live with an optimistic view on life.
As the four women entered America, which is far from their motherland China, they experience a change of culture, the American culture, which was dominant than the Chinese. The Chinese mothers are faced with a difficult task of how to raise their American-born daughters with an understanding of their heritage. The daughters clearly show a gap in culture between the Chinese culture and American culture. The mothers wanted their daughter to follow the Chinese traditions, but the daughters followed the American traditions and even some of them got married to American men. The mothers tried to tell their daughters the story about the Chinese ancestors but the daughter could not follow them and the daughters thought their mothers were backwards and did not know what they are saying. As much as the mothers tried to show love to their daughters, the daughters usually responded negatively. They often saw their mothers’ attempts to guidance as a failure to understand the American culture. Being Chinese and living in America, both the mothers and the daughters struggle with many issues like identity, language, translation, and others. The mothers try to reconcile their Chinese pasts with their American presents; the daughters try to find a balance between independence and loyalty to their heritage
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.
Four Chinese mothers have migrated to America. Each hope for their daughter’s success and pray that they will not experience the hardships faced in China. One mother, Suyuan, imparts her knowledge on her daughter through stories. The American culture influences her daughter, Jing Mei, to such a degree that it is hard for Jing Mei to understand her mother's culture and life lessons. Yet it is not until Jing Mei realizes that the key to understanding who her mother was and who she is lies in understanding her mother's life.
Polyamory, like polygamy, refers to the state of conducting multiple romantic relationships at once; however, there are many distinctions between the terms. The most blatant difference is that polygamy specifies the participants are all married to each other, whereas polyamory encompasses a spectrum of relationships ranging from casual to committed. Furthermore, polygamy has its roots in religious and highly patriarchal systems, such as the Abrahamic faiths or the notorious Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Quite distinctly, the lifestyle we now know as polyamory grew out of the hippies’ free love movement in the 1960s, with considerably different values. In its modern form, it is a secular alternative lifestyle that is gradually gaining in popularity. It is estimated that there are over half a million openly polyamorous families in the United States alone.
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).
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.
Understanding the Chinese culture was confusing for Kingston. “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese , how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (Kingston 223). Kingston questions her tradition and she doesn’t seem very sure what it is. She questions whether what her mother did by...
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.
The difficult struggle of finding true identities ate the energy of these young women. “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan is about a group of young mothers and their daughters having issues with their identities as Chinese women in an American world. The establishment the women created became The Joy Luck Club. Throughout everyone’s stories, many lessons were learned. The Chinese women often faced the issue of not being able to accept their identities. As well as not being able to find their identities: it became lost in the hype of all the judgment of others. As the women dealt with these problems, they also bonded as a group.
Friedman, H. S., & Schustack, M. W. (2012). Personality: Classic theories and modern research (5th ed). Boston , MA, USA: Pearson
“Polygamy is defined as a marriage in which a spouse of either gender has more than one mate at the same time. Polygamy is considered a valid form of marriage in many countries and communities around the globe” (Al-Krenawi). However, polygamy is illegal in the United States. Those who practice polygamy in America can only be “legally” married to one spouse; therefore, the subsequent spouses in a polygamist relationship hold a “singl...