How Does Amy Tan Use Water In The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan uses water to connect misfortunes and the loss of hope throughout the novel The Joy Luck Club. Water is a common thread that appears in the defining parts of each woman’s life. Though the events that include water influence them greatly, they are usually awful memories and therefore the water that is often present in some way becomes a way to predict and foreshadow these unfortunate events while linking all the women.

Water is an element that cannot be controlled, with time it will wear away at rock and weaken any metal. Water is also untamable and vital to the survival of every living being on earth. While it foreshadows many misfortunate events and links the events of The Joy Luck Club, it is still untamable and presents itself in

a variety of ways, some more clear than others.
An-Mei and her daughter Rose were scarred both mentally and physically by water. With Rose’s brother drowning and An-Mei’s scar from a pot of boiling water that symbolizes her early family dynamic and lack of a mother in her early life, both women withstood much as children that stay with them today. As a child, An-Mei lived with her grandmother, because her widow mother became the third concubine of a rich man, and the family shunned her. She came back to take An-Mei, but the family wouldn’t let her. “An-Mei! An-Mei! I could see my mother’s face across the table. Between us stood the soup pot on its heavy chimney-pot stand––rocking slowly, back and forth. And then with one shout this dark boiling soup spilled forward and fell all over my neck. It was as though everyone’s anger were pouring all over me” (46). This soup clearly represents the anger and confusion in An-Mei’s family. It represents everyone's pent-up emotions pouring out and onto An-Mei’s young, naive head. The family and the pot stood between An-Mei and her mother. Both exploded onto her. Water signifies the gap in her family.
As a young girl, Rose, An-Mei's daughter experiences water ripping her life apart. She is watching her siblings at the beach and sees Bing walking along the water. “His little body is moving so quickly...And I think, He’s going to fall in... And just as I think this, his feet are already in the air... before he splashes into the sea and disappears without leaving so much as a ripple in the water” (125). This is a defining moment for Rose, she blames herself for what happened to Bing. After this day, Rose is unsure of herself and does not want to take responsibility or make large decisions. She is afraid of hurting others and making mistakes. Her mother An-Mei still had faith in Chinese superstition and brought Rose back to the beach. She poured sweetened tea into the water and threw a family ring into the water “This would make the coiling dragon forgetful of Bing” (129). An-Mei lost faith in the Bible that day. This is similar to her mother’s experiences. When An-Mei’s grandmother was dying, An-Mei’s mother “...took her flesh and put it in the soup. She cooked magic in the ancient tradition to try and cure her mother this one last time” (48). Giving parts of oneself seem to be an important superstition and key to solving the unsolvable. The last effort for both An-mei and her mother to save those they love. Water had wounded both An-Mei and Rose. It symbolizes not only the gap in their family but their last hope and demonstrates how superstition can be the last attempt to do the impossible.
As a young girl of twelve years old, Lindo’s house was flooded and she was forced to move into the cold, harsh house of her future husband and mother-in-law. As a result of this, she sees all the negative aspects of Waverly’s partners, changing how Waverley sees them and eventually causing them to break apart. The flood caused Lindo to live apart from her family and with her future husband’s, but it also inadvertently ruined any relationships her daughter had before Rich. “My [Lindo’s] life changed completely when I was twelve, the summer the heavy rain came. The Fen River which ran through the middle of my family’s land flooded the plains…. Even our house on the top of the little hill became unlivable… I was twelve years old, old enough to separate from my family and live with the Huangs” (53). The wording of how Lindo says she was only twelve, “old enough to leave her family” seems to mean that she had just reached the age when she could barely live without her family. She is young when she goes to live in Huang Taitai house because of the flood. Her unhappy experiences regarding her first marriage and living with the Huangs led Lindo to show her daughter Waverley all the flaws in her boyfriends. She does this out of love for her daughter but it ruins all of Waverly’s relationships until she finally confronts Lindo.
When Ying-Ying was a young woman, she married a man who left her shortly before she gave birth to a son. She contemplated throwing herself into the lake, but instead, her despair turned to anger. She killed the baby before she gave birth and told the nurses to “...wrap it like a fish and throw it in the lake” (248). There are multiple times when this experience affects how Ying-Ying sees the world and influences how Lena sees the world. They were walking on the street when Ying-Ying says, “A man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you have a baby. Then you’ll kill the baby. And when they find the baby in a garbage can… You’ll go to jail, die there” (106). Though this is the main focus of Ying-Ying’s superstitions and paranoia, the many of Ying-Ying’s superstitions center around unhappy marriages or details relating to Ying-Ying’s negative experiences. An example is when she told Lena that by not eating all her rice, Lena’s future husband will have marks all over his face is one example. Lena fully believed her mother and still, she finds herself in an unhappy marriage as her mother originally did.
June and Suyuan have both had experiences that involve and require faith. Before her eighth birthday dinner, June played with the crab that she would be eating for dinner that night. When she watched what happened to it, how it was boiled alive in a pot of water, she was scarred for life from its screams and had to try to imagine that it was unable to tell it was dying from the element that had sustained its life. This is similar to Suyuan’s twin daughters, who she left by a road with no way of knowing if they would live, even as she moved to the United States. She just had to believe that they would survive. Faith and hope are huge aspects of Chinese culture and these two women’s lives. “But before I could even decide what to name my new pet, my mother had dropped it into a pot of cold water and placed it on the tall stove. I had watched with growing dread as the water heated up and the pot began to clutter with this crab trying to tap its way out of his own hot soup” (201). Water can nurture, but it can also destroy. The imagery of a crab trying to “tap its way out of its own soup” brings to mind a daughter trying to escape from the shadow of their mother, as many of the daughters in The Joy Luck Club struggle with.
Not only do the women connect with their daughters through water, but they also connect with other daughters through certain memories that have much more in common than one notices when they first read.

Each woman chooses to believe and have faith in their traditions and customs. They have all had experiences where they resort to seemingly crazy customs and actions for the survival of those they care about. The mothers desperately want their daughters to understand them and think well of them. Ying-Ying says, “My daughter thinks I do not know what it means to not want a baby” (248). This represents the lack of understanding between all the daughters and mothers on the novel, the main reason they are drifting apart. Rose’s story is intertwined with Ying-Ying’s story. Rose and Ying-Ying were both cheated on by their husbands. Rose is further connected to Ying-Ying from their childhoods. Ying-Ying falls into the water as a child on the night of the moon lady, “And I turned around so I could find the moon lady and tell her my secret wish. But right at that moment, everybody else must have seen her too. Because firecrackers exploded, and I fell into the water not even hearing my own splash” (77-78). Everybody was distracted and she fell into the water. Though from a different perspective, Rose watched as her brother Bing fell into the water. She had been distracted by her other siblings when Bing fell into the water with barely a ripple. The only difference is that Ying-Ying’s survived when Bing didn’t. Both these experiences affected Rose and Ying-Ying for the rest of their lives. All of the women’s stories in the Joy Luck club family are intertwined, and despite growing up with different languages they would all benefit from learning from each other to find their

commonalities.
Each of the women in The Joy Luck Club has withstood terrible situations or experiences and survived. The presence of water, whether the reason for the pain, mentioned in passing, or implied in the imagery has been present in every circumstance. Water is what all the women all have in common with their daughters. It can wear down the toughest stone or do absolutely nothing, but it is a link between every woman and major story in the novel, foreshadowing misfortune and being present in some way.