Identity In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

662 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How does class affect your identity

Kenzie Kress English 10 Sem. 2 The Joy Luck Club 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. In the start of the book, the character named Suyaun was introduced. She started the whole Joy Luck Club. A group of Chinese mothers and their American-raised daughters. Each time The Joy Luck Club got together, they would play a game called mah-jong. The women played this game in hopes of luck, to bring them joy and …show more content…

What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?” (25). In this passage, Suyuan pursued the goal of establishing the Joy Luck Club for her personal benefit. While being faced with the horrors of poverty and murder in Kweilin, Suyuan searched for a sanctuary. She decided she could escape the pain seen around her through the simple game of mah jong. With three other women and a variety of delicious food, she traveled to a place far from the wasteland she resided in. They called these gatherings the Joy Luck Club. Suyuan also noted that many people believed she was foolish for celebrating and partying in such desperate times. While others starved, her and her friends held feasts. The Joy Club laughed as young children cried in

Show More
Related

  • Chinese Women In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

    1258 Words  | 3 Pages

    At the beginning of the novel, Suyuan Woo begins telling the story of The Joy Luck Club, a group started by a small family of Chinese women during World War II, where "we feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky.

    Read More

  • Characterization in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

    505 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

    772 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • An Analysis Of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

    1319 Words  | 3 Pages

    The American-born daughters do not fathom the amount of pain that their mothers had experienced so they do not realize that their problems could be much worse. The daughters relate to their mothers in that they are all facing their greatest problems. No matter how trivial or significant problems may seem, to one it may be the worst they have experienced and to another it could be less worse than what they have experienced. The immigrant mothers grew up with much more pain than their daughters, therefore they have a thicker skin and are less ignorant. Since the daughters have grown up “swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow,” (Tan, 17) they experience pain from seemingly insignificant problems in comparison to their mother’s hardships. The mother’s good intentions and struggles are unrecognized by their daughters. Tan writes about this misfortune through describing an old Chinese woman immigrating to America in the beginning of the novel: “But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leaving the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind” (Tan, 17). This immigrant’s story represents the four Chinese-American immigrants and how their hopes and dreams were hit with reality when they came to America. For example, Lindo describes how America has certain secret rules that you must discover. "This American rules...Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, Too bad, go back. They not telling you why so you can use their way go forward. They say, Don’t know why, you find out yourself. But they knowing all the time. Better you take it, find out why yourself" (Tan, 94). Lindo obviously believes in

    Read More

  • The Tao Of The Joy Luck Club

    1290 Words  | 3 Pages

    As the game begins, the women first “wash” the tiles in a chaotic mixing motion and then work together to structure these game tiles into an orderly creation in the center of the board (Tan 22). This is the effect of the fifth direction in the women’s lives. As the members of the Joy Luck Club, bring the chaos of their lives and find peace through the combined effect of their relationships with each other. This process of bringing peace from the midst of chaos is first seen when the first Joy Luck Club was created in Kweilin. In Kweilin Suyun finds herself in an extremely chaotic and violent environment, which is the result of the refugee-camp-like city, and the frequent bombings, which it comes under.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Happy Endings By Mary Atwood

    1061 Words  | 3 Pages

    The two characters both fall in love and get married, have good jobs, charming houses, two children who turn out well, go on vacations, have hobbies, and retire. Everything that they do is “stimulating and challenging”, this phrase also becomes very repetitive throughout this short story because it gives the reader the knowledge to know that some of the characters do things that aren’t boring but some of their actions do not match up. Although scenario A is all good and the idealistic expectation of a happy life, they eventually die. That 's the end of the story for A. This is considered the happy ending because the life of both John and Mary is smooth sailing but as we move on to the other scenarios you’ll find that the plot gets more interesting and the characters face more conflict which leads us to the next scenario which is

    Read More

  • Free Joy Luck Club Essays - Movie vs Book

    884 Words  | 2 Pages

    The first member of the Joy Luck Club to die was Suyuan Woo.  Her daughter, Jing-mei "June" Woo, is asked to sit in and take her mother's place at playing mah jong.  Memories of the past are shared by the three women left, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong and Ying-ying St Clair.  June Woo learns of the real secret her mother carried to her grave from her mother's friends.  The twin baby girls, her half sisters, Suyuan pushed in a Wheelbarrow as she escaped from the Japanese.  Due to sickness, Suyuan can no longer carry her babies, and is forced to leave them on the side of the road.  She lives her whole life not knowing if they are alive or dead.

    Read More

  • Gender and Its Relationship with the Joy Luck Club

    888 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Joy Luck Club, is a film that shows a powerful portrayal of four Chinese women and the lives of their children in America. The film presents the conflicting cultures between the United States and China, and how men treat women throughout their lives. People living in the United States usually take for granted their roles as a male or female. The culture of each country shapes the treatment one receives based on the sex of the individual. Gender roles shape this movie and allows people, specifically the United States, to see how gender are so crutcial in othe countries.

    Read More

  • The Joy Luck Club And Waverly Relationship

    1486 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, describes the lives of four Asian women who

    Read More

  • Americanization in The Joy Luck Club

    1951 Words  | 4 Pages

    Oftentimes the children of immigrants to the United States lose the sense of cultural background in which their parents had tried so desperately to instill within them. According to Walter Shear, “It is an unseen terror that runs through both the distinct social spectrum experienced by the mothers in China and the lack of such social definition in the daughters’ lives.” This “unseen terror” is portrayed in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as four Chinese women and their American-born daughters struggle to understand one another’s culture and values. The second-generation women in The Joy Luck Club prove to lose their sense of Chinese values, becoming Americanized.

    Read More

  • Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club

    1520 Words  | 4 Pages

    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. The hardest problem communicating emerges between Suyuan and Jing-Mei.   Suyuan is a very strong woman who lost everything she ever had in China: "her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls" (141).

    Read More

  • Similarities Between The Joy Luck Club And For A Daughter Who Leaves

    1322 Words  | 3 Pages

    Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club, displays life lessons mothers pass down to their daughters through the character An-mei, while Janice Mirikitani mirrors the morales presented in Tan’s novel through her own work, “For a Daughter Who Leaves”. The Joy Luck Club follows a series of mothers and their daughters and how they perceive and react to the cultural gap between them. An-mei’s story follows her through her life in China and her new life in America. In China, she witnesses the abuse her mother goes through and eventually her mother’s suicide. She does not want her daughter, Rose, to repeat the same mistakes her mother and herself made, so she tries to teach Rose how to live a happy and full life without regrets.

    Read More

  • Selling-Out the Asian-American Community in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

    673 Words  | 2 Pages

    i wish i could join in the universal praise for amy tan and her best-selling novel "the joy luck club." i wish i could find the latest chinese-american literary dish as appetizing as the rest of the american public does.  but i can't. before amy tan entered the scene, public images of asian america had not developed since the middle of the century. the asian american male did not exist except as a barbaric japanese or vietcong soldier. the asian american female remained the adolescent suzy wong pipe dream, toyed with for a while and then deserted.

    Read More

  • Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

    1798 Words  | 4 Pages

    ... and in her hurry to get away, she (falls) before she even reach(s) the corner,” (87).  This foreshadows the relationship between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club.  The daughters can not understand the reasoning behind their mothers’ decisions.  However, the mothers realize their daughters are so much like them and they do not want this to happen.  The daughters grow up being “Americanized,” but as they grow older they begin to want to understand their Chinese culture.  All of the characters learned many valuable lessons that will be passed on to their own children.

    Read More

  • Mother Daughter Relationships - The Mother-daughter Relationship in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

    1165 Words  | 3 Pages

    In The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, the characters Suyuan and June have a mother-daughter relationship fraught with conflict, but ultimately rooted in deep love and commitment for one another. Because of drastic differences in the environments in which they were raised and in their life experiences, these two women have many opposing ideas and beliefs. This coupled with their lack of communication are responsible for many of the problems they encounter during the course of their relationship. These conflicts are only resolved when June learns about her mother's past and accepts their respective differences. The manner in which their relationship develops and the conflicts June and Suyuan face reveal some of the themes that Amy Tan intends for the readers to learn. These themes concern such topics as finding life's importance, making choices, and understanding ourselves and our families.

    Read More

More about Identity In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Open Document