Joy Luck Club Culture

In the novel The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, she shares the conflict of cultural differences through the stories of the mothers and their daughters. She exposes the cultural differences by creating sixteen stories of four Chinese mothers and their Americanized daughter’s struggle in the United States. Suffering from horrific tragedies the four mothers created The Joy Luck Club to fill their lives with food and joy. The novel opens with Jing-Mei Woo, who is asked to take her mother’s place after she passed two months before. The novel then moves into the suffering caused by the treatment the characters receive. Tan elucidated her point throughout the novel by placing small details of herself into the moral that is being presented. Tan also explores

In the novel, the daughters were embarrassed of their heritage leaving their mothers feeling broke. “The American-born daughters are ambivalent about their Chinese background. While they eat Chinese foods and celebrate Chinese traditions, they want their Chinese heritage to remain home” (Henrickson). The mothers wanted each of their daughters to have both the American life while still having Chinese traditions. “I wanted my children to have the best combination: American Circumstances and Chinese Character. How could I know these two things do not mx?” (Tan 254). The United States made the daughters feel like they had to be just like everyone else. They wanted to be American. They didn’t want to be Chinese because they felt ashamed of their culture. They began to feel different and distanced from their mothers because what their mothers wanted were different than what they wanted. “I think about our two faces…. Which one is American? Which one is Chinese? Which one is better? If you show one, you must always sacrifice the other… so now I think, what did I lose? What did I get back in return?” (Tan 266). The daughters felt as if them and their mothers spoke different languages and came from differents worlds. “These kinds of explanations made me feel my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did. I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese” (Tan 80). The treatment the characters received affected

Immigrants are forced upon rules and difficulties once arriving to the United States. ““This American rules,” she concluded at last. “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 to 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 96). They also receive terrible treatment. Most immigrants feel as if they have to change themselves and stop all traditions just to fit in. “For many Chinese Americans, life in the United States is a series of dualities - two identities, two voices, two cultures, and even two names - that represent an uneasy stance somewhere between the traditional Chinese culture of their own or their parents’ homeland and the contemporary American culture…” (Huntley 73). The treatment immigrants receive is a vast discipline for what their culture is. People make them feel as if they are an alien, that they are not human. “Cultural criticism is such a vast and sprawling (and growing) discipline that it is not easy to arrive at a succinct definition that will both say enough for clarity and avoid the kind of over-definition that leads inevitably to obfuscation” (Huntley 68). Immigrants usually come together to battle their wars and feelings. Most