Joy Luck Club Foreshadowing

To guide the reader into following the storyline of The Joy Luck Club, Tan utilizes literary techniques in order to emphasize events and ideas in the novel. One of the various techniques used in the novel is foreshadowing. Lena and her mother, Ying-ying, is one of the four mother-daughter relationships which exemplifies foreshadowing. Lena describes her mother to have the ability to foretell unfortunate events which she views as a pessimistic viewpoint. For example, when Lena was eight years old, Ying-ying warned if Lena did not eat every piece of rice in her bowl that she would end up marrying a bad man. Although concerned with her mother’s pessimistic views, Lena comes to understand Ying-ying when she realizes everything she projected

would become reality “..it annoys me that all she sees are the bad parts. But then I look around and everything she’s said is true. This convinces me she can see what else is going on, between Harold and me” (Tan 82). An additional situation where foreshadowing is illustrated is when a vase is on Harold’s, Lena’s husband, unsturdy side table he built during his earlier years of college. Similar to the unstable table, Lena’s marriage is unstable and could crash at any second. Ying-ying insinuates the troubled relationship between the married couple through the shattering of the vase, “‘Fallen down.’ she says simply. ‘It doesn’t matter’ I say. ‘I knew it would happen.’ ‘Then why you don’t stop it?’ asks my mother. And it’s such a simple question” (Tan 91). Even though Lena is aware of the instability she continues to not take action in preventing the downfall of the relationship.
Furthermore, Tan’s usage of symbolism similarly accentuates the overall ideas in the novel The Joy Luck Club.

Throughout Jing-mei’s childhood, she never truly appreciated how much her mother, Suyuan, had done for her. Purchasing an expensive piano and working away to get Jing-mei piano lessons are a couple of the many things her mother has done for her. When Jing-mei became an adult she finally understood how considerate her mother is. Once her mother had passed she grew an appreciation to the physical objects her mother had given her “...sentimental attachment to the piano, and one day she plays Schumann’s piano pieces “Pleading Child” and “Perfectly Contented” and discovers that they are “two halves of the same song”” (Wang). Due to the difficulty of communication, the message of the two songs Suyuan wished to depict was not evident to Jing-mei at the time. Similarly, Jing-mei only valued her mother’s necklace after she passed. Once Jing-mei accepted her mother’s necklace she began to wear it in hopes to absorb and understand Suyuan, “June accepts this as a deep expression of her mother’s love, despite the fact the intricate carvings are opaque to her, carrying secrets she supposes she will never understand” (Gerhardt). If it wasn’t for the troubled relationship they share, then the mother and daughter could have conversed on a deeper

level.
Subsequently, the novel’s events Tan portrays is achieved through the literary technique of structure. One may notice Tan’s unique choice of having eight contrasting perspectives told within a single novel. Alongside the accumulation of mothers and daughters, Tan manipulates the structure by dividing each chapter into generation. Then, taking it a step further, each subchapter focuses on one of the character’s standpoint in the moment, “a heteroglot collection of very different, fully valid voices each presented from its own perspective, with relativistic and centrifugal implications” (Souris 2). This configuration allows time to be divided amongst the mothers’ and daughters’ past and present viewpoint while keeping the reader up to date of what is happening in both time periods, “two generations of mothers' and daughters' lives and anecdotes about grandparents...shuttles back and forth between past and present, one of its challenges being to unite the two” (Eder 2). Hence, the novel alludes the major theme of struggling with communication between the two generations