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Mother daughter relationships in the Joy luck club
Mother daughter relationships in the Joy luck club
Mother daughter relationships in the Joy luck club
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Learning Love and Respect in The Joy Luck Club
In Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the character of An-mei learns to love and respect her mother. This essay will focus on the precise moment of the transformation of An-mei to a strong, self-confident woman.
Although An-mei's mother was dying, An-mei's mother still believed in saving her by "cooking magic in the ancient tradition" so as "to try to cure her mother this one last time". That was how An-mei "came to love my mother", "how I saw her in my own true nature and what was beneath my skin, inside my bones". An-mei's mother "pull up her sleeve" and "put this knife on the softest part of her arm" and "cut a piece of meat from her arm". An-mei "tried to close my eyes, but could not". An-mei saw that "tears poured from her (mother's) face and blood spilled to the floor. Even though Popo's mouth was "already too tight from trying to keep her spirit in", An-mei's mother still "fed her this soup". However, Popo passed away in the end.
An-mei "could see the pain of the flesh" and "the worth of the pain". She understands that this is the way " a daughter honours her mother", "it is to shou so deep it is in your bones". She knows that "the pain of the flesh is nothing, the pain you must forget".
When An-mei returned with her mother to Teintsin, she had an encounter with Second Wife who gave her a pearl necklace. Her mother scolded her for it. "what you hear is not genuine. She(Second Wife)makes clouds with one hand, rain with the other. She is trying to trick you, so you will do anything for her", but An-mei "tried not to listen to my mother". In the end, An-mei's mother crushed the pearl necklace and it was only then that An-mei realized "the necklace that had almost bought my heart and mind now had one bead of crushed glass". Her mother did not want An-mei to let Second Wife "buy you(her) for such a cheap price". After that, An-mei would always "remember how easy it is to lose myself to something false". An-mei saw the truth beyond the surface with her mother's help.
After knowing what happened to her mother, An-mei saw how circumstantial her mother was.
No relationship is ever perfect no matter how great it seems. In the novel The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan, she tells the story of a few mother daughter pairs that are in a group named the Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club is a group of women who come together once a week to play mahjong. The founder of the Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo, dies, leaving her daughter Jing-mei to take her place in the club. Her daughter, Jing-mei, receives money from the other members of the club to travel to China in order to find her mother's twin daughters who were left many years ago. In this book you get more of the details of this family and a few more. Amy Tan uses the stories of Jing-mei and Suyuan, Waverly and Jindo, and An-mei and Rose to portray her theme of, mother daughter relationships can be hard at times but they are always worth it in the end.
Symbolism is seen throughout the short story and has a significant effect on the young girls at the end. At the beginning of the story, the three girls are playfully fighting; at the end, the girls are silent and are left with questions. The symbol of water has had this impact on the girls because it is seen as a majestic and virtuous force that has run within their family and made them strong. Waipuo, who is an elder, has come to understand this because it is depicted that she often sat with the girls in silence, and appears to be very strict. As an elder, Waipuo understands how important the water is and says that “our strength and spirit wear down mountains into sand. But even our people must respect the water.” The water is seen as a divine force that controls their lives and without it, the family would be weak and they would powdered down and broken apart, but because they understand the power and respect the water, they are strong and have value. Although the pearl ring is not as prominent of a symbol as water, it is still important when Waipuo tells the tale. The pearl ring symbolizes purity, and it foreshadows how pure and innocent Wen Zhiqing’s daughter was. This pearl ring provoked the daughter to believe that a beloved husband was waiting for her in the river, and when she had told her father this, he said it was “nonsense.” It was disregarded as real because Wen is older and wiser, while his daughter still believed this because she was young and naive. The pearl ring created a false hope and dream within her that lead her to hurry to the water during a terrible flood. The young girls can connect both symbols to their own lives and realize that the water is powerful, and it can help them, but it should not be played with because it is dangerous. The
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.
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.
In The Joy Luck Club, the novel traces the fate of the four mothers-Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair-and their four daughters-June Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. Through the experiences that these characters go through, they become women. The mothers all fled China in the 1940's and they all retain much of their heritage. Their heritage focuses on what is means to be a female, but more importantly what it means to be an Asian female.
The Joy Luck Club is an emotional tale about four women who saw life as they had seen it back in China. Because the Chinese were very stereotypic, women were treated as second class citizens and were often abused. Through sad and painful experiences, these four women had tried to raise their daughters to live the American dream by giving them love and support, such things which were not available to them when they were young. These women revealed their individual accounts in narrative form as they relived it in their memories. These flashbacks transport us to the minds of these women and we see the events occur through their eyes. There were many conflicts and misunderstandings between the two generations due to their differences in upbringing and childhood. In the end, however, these conflicts would bring mother and daughter together to form a bond that would last forever.
Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club describes the lives of first and second generation Chinese families, particularly mothers and daughters. Surprisingly The Joy Luck Club and, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts are very similar. They both talk of mothers and daughters in these books and try to find themselves culturally. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs.
In the novel when Pearl was ask who she is, she stated that she is her mother’s child. Pearl is being truthful telling that her mother is all she has known to take care of her. Pearl isn’t ashamed of her mother and all she desires is the truth from her mother concerning the scarlet letter “A”. “For all her faults, Pearl is the hardest truth-sayer in the novel” (“Pearl in chapter
An-Mei Hsu was born and raised in China, but not by her mother. Her mother became the concubine of another man when An-Mei’s father had died. So An-Mei and her little brother went to live with there grandmother who they called Popo. At the house in which they lived they were not aloud to talk about, or even speak of there mother and soon enough, An-Mei and her little brother had forgotten her altogether. But Popo becomes very sick, and An-Mei’s mother returns to the home. When she was there she cuts a piece of her arm off and puts it in to soup for Popo. This was to show great respect, and was also a way of trying to cure the sick. "Here is how I came to love me mother. How I saw my own true nature. What was beneath my skin. Inside my bones." (pg40) This is the point where An-Mei is thought about respect and honor. She saw what her mother had done for Popo, and found it in her heart to forgive her and love her again. From then on she wanted to make sure that her daughters would have honor, and respect for the family ways. "The pain you must forget, because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones." (pg41) She saw what her mother take a piece of her own flesh and give it to Popo in order to earn her respect and honor back.
After Jing-Mei’s mother passes away she started looking at the piano with admiration. She sat down at it and started playing after all those years. At first, she thought that she would have forgotten how to play, but she seemed to have picked up right where she left off. The piano is the symbolism; Jing-Mei sits down to play the piano at the end of the story. By doing this it shows th...
I feel sorry for An-mei as her mind has been greatly influenced by her grandmother. She observed her mother and “saw that she had a long white neck”, “just like the goose that had laid me” (one of her grandmother’s stories). She knew she “was the girl whose belly held a colourless winter melon”. “ Popo told me not to speak her name”, thus An-mei “stood there, mute”, not daring to address her mother. This is pitiful of An-mei as she does not deserve this treatment from her grandmother, making her confused and hesitant towards her mother. I have pity for An-mei as she “did not look for fear my head would burst and my brains would dribble out of my ears”, scared as she laid in her mother’s arms.
Amy Tan starts The Joy Luck Club with the daughter, Jing-mei, and mother, Suyuan Woo. Suyuan lived through a hard life in Kweilin during the war and teaches her daughter to keep her head up and have faith, even though things may seem hard at the time. When Suyuan lived in Kweilin, she had many things that could depress her, "but to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable" (11). Suyuan's wishful thinking reveals that she did not want to think of all the bad things happening around her. Rather, she wanted to focus on the fact that she "had luxuries few people could afford" (10). The ability to find the good when others see only bad helped Suyuan center her attention on the superior things that she had, such as the Joy Luck Club and her friends. Later, when Jing-mei goes to meet her sisters in China, she becomes "so nervous [she] can't even feel [her] feet"(331). The uneasy emo...
In the novel The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan portrays the effects of childhood events on the roles and attitudes of the present lives each character must face. Particularly, Lena St. Clair felt restricted by her mother as she shields her from the dangers of the outside world. Consequently, when Lena did face trouble, she was unable to fight back and saw evil in everything she saw. Furthermore, the constant conflict that arose from the male superiority in Ying-Ying’s marriage and her miscommunications with her husband influenced Lena’s present behavior. Instead of expressing her own concerns, Lena allows her husband to make major decisions. Influenced by her childhood experiences and the troubles of the marriage between her parents, Lena inherits a passive role in her relationship to Harold.
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In the Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan, focuses on mother-daughter relationships. She examines the lives of four women who emigrated from China, and the lives of four of their American-born daughters. The mothers: Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-Ying St. Clair had all experienced some life-changing horror before coming to America, and this has forever tainted their perspective on how they want their children raised. 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.