Mother-Daughter Conflict Illustrated in The Joy Luck Club

The book The Joy Luck Club is a novel written by Amy Tan, who is very famous in writing about mother-daughter relationships. There are four pairs of mothers and daughters whose stories are told in The Joy Luck Club. All of the mothers were born in China and came to America because of some kind of problem, but their daughters were born in the United States. Due to the fact that the daughters were born in the United States, they are extremely Americanized. Consequently, they do not value the Chinese heritage which their mothers valued dearly. As the daughters are growing up, this conflict between them increases. Suyuan Woo and her daughter, June or Jing-mei, two characters from the book, had major conflicts over the Chinese belief system of Confucianism and on the matter of death and mourning.

Jing-mei grew up being believed to be, and was treated as, a prodigy by her mother, Suyuan, who believed that “you could be anything you wanted to be in America” (Tan 141), therefore if one wants to be a prodigy, one can be. However, Jing-mei was not a hard-working child who which resulted in he...