East-West Values and the Mother-daughter Relationship in The Joy Luck Club
The dominant theme of The Joy Luck Club is the clash between Chinese, American cultures, and how it affects the relationship between mothers and daughters. All of the mothers in the book were born and raised in China. All of their daughters were born and raised in the United States. Because of the differences in family traditions and values between the way the mothers had been raised in China and the way their daughters were growing up in America, there was bound to be a clash between the two generations. Perhaps the most dramatic example of how East-West conflicting traditions and values affected a mother-daughter relationship was that of Suyuan Woo and her daughter, Jing-mei.
When the book opens, Suyuan has been dead for two months. Her daughter, who prefers to call herself by the American name of "June" rather than her Chinese name, has been asked by her father to take her dead mother's place. She was to take Suyuan's place in a club Suyuan started when she moved to America. June was to be the fourth member of this club, which was hosted at one of the member's homes each session and the group played mahjong and provided strength for each other in their transition to becoming Americanized. Over the course of the next few months, through the conversations and stories told by her mother's old friends at the mahjong table, June learns a great deal about her mother, and, ultimately, about herself as well.
One of the conflicts between East and West is clash between the hard work ethic of Asian parents and the easier-going standards that Western parents have for their children. Watching a little Chinese girl playing the p...
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Heung, Marina. "Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." Feminist Studies (Fall 1993): 597-616.
Hagedorn, Jessica. "Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck." Signs of Life in the USA. 2nd. ed. Ed. Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon.
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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.
In her novel The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan tells of the lives of four Chinese immigrant mothers, their hopes, their dreams and the way each of their daughters feel about their mother's lives. Mother-daughter relationships are the basis for the entire story. Tan shows the hardships each mother experiences as a child and young adult, and how they all want better lives for their daughters. She shows the struggles between the mothers and the daughters; these struggles result from many different things, from the cultural gap, to dreams and goals that may have been set too high. Each daughter knows her mother means well, but this does not make the battles any easier. Through careful details Amy Tan shows readers the significance of each of the four mother-daughter relationships in the novel, how each daughter is slowly but surely becoming her mother.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Vintage Contemporaries. New York: A Division of Random House, Inc. 1993.
Heung, Marina. "Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." Feminist Studies (Fall 1993): 597-616.
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.
Heung, Marina. "Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." Feminist Studies (Fall 1993): 597-616.
Carey, Gary. Cliff notes on Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Lincoln, Nebraska. Cliff Notes. 1994.
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.
When CFC molecules reach the stratosphere, the sun's radiation breaks it apart, freeing the chorine atom to destroy ozone molecules. The effect is a growing ozone hole which forms over Antarctica in October and usually lasts through mid November. During the annual ozone hole, the amount of UV radiation that reaches the Earth can double. Ozone depletion serves as a major health risk for human beings. The three primary health effects of ultraviolet radiation on human health are damage to the skin,eyes, and immune system.
“The ozone is a pale bluish form of oxygen gas with an odor like chlorine, formed by an electrical discharge in the air” (Webster 185).
Heung, Marina. "Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club." Feminist Studies. Fall 1993: 597 - 613.
Now is a critical time to address the issue of deforestation. Around the world forests are logged for timber and paper pulp. South America contains a large amount of mahogany and rosewood—highly coveted types of wood—within the Amazon basin. Forests are also cleared to make room for the planting of cash crops, such as coffee and soy, as well as livestock farms. After only a few years, overuse of these lands for crops typically causes soil erosion that quickly turns deforested regions into wastelands. Deforestation is responsible for 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than all emissions all motorized transportation added together. The destruction of forests does not just threaten our climate; it threatens the livelihoods of billions of people that rely on forests for food and economic activities. The modern world relies on rainforests more than for the well-known reason. People receive many of their fruits and medicines from plant species that survive solely within the heart of a rainforest. Let’s not forget that forests also serve as habitats to wildlife a...
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.
Foster, M. Marie Booth. "Voice, Mind, Self: Mother-Daughter Relationships 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.
The Joy Luck Club daughters incontestably become Americanized as they continue to grow up. They lose their sense of Chinese values, or Chinese tradition in which their mothers tried to drill into their minds. The four young women adopt the American culture and way of life, and they think differently than their traditional Chinese mothers do, upsetting the mothers greatly. The daughters do not even understand the culture of their mothers, and vice versa. They find that the American way of thinking is very different from that of the Chinese.