Relationships in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club Joy Luck Club Essays

Relationships in The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is a representation of the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between mother and daughter in a Chinese American society and is written by Amy Tan. The book illustrates the hardships both the mother and daughters go through in order to please the other. Also, it shows the troubles the daughters face when growing up in two cultures. This book reveals that most of the time mothers really do know best. Throughout all of the Jing-Mei Woo stories, June has to recall all of the memories of what her mother had told her. She remembers how her mother left her babies during the war. Junes mother felt that since she had failed as a mother to her first babies she had failed as a person. When she made June take piano lessons June thought that she was trying to make her become a child prodigy like Waverly, but her mother did this because she knew it would benefit June for the rest of her life. Because of the death of her mother, June was forced to take the place of her mother in more than just filling her place at the Maj Jong table. The mother daughter tradition was broken because the lost babies were found after the death of their mother. Junes trip to China can be seen as the completion of her mothers promise to return, honoring her sisters by attempting to transfer what she had absorbed from her mother and her tradition. And I think, My mother is right. I am becoming Chinese(Tan 306). This is what June thinks as she crosses into China. Like the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol, June and her mother have become two of the same thing. The only difference being their thoughts, June with American, her mother with Chinese. This has kept the mother-daughter tradition alive but has also weakened it. This happens often, but there is always something that sticks and is passed down from generation to generation. Heredity is the transmission from one generation to the next of factors that determine the traits of offspring. Although successful breeding of plants and animals was practiced by humans long before modern civilizations were established, there is no evidence that these early people understood the nature of hereditary factors or how they are transmitted through reproduction. The story of June and An-mei is a prime example of heredity. Although many girls' worst fears would be turning out like their mother, it can't, in many ways, be helped. June felt slightly hesitant in becoming more like her mother but, it, in the words of June's mother An-mei, "Cannot be helped" (Tan 306). June's hesitance can be seen in a quote referring to her mothers statement of certain heredity: "And when she said this, I saw myself transforming like a werewolf, a mutant tag of DNA suddenly triggered, repplicating itself into a syndrome, a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors, all of those things my mother did to embarrass me....." (Tan 307). Whether these traits were manifested due to lifelong exposure to her mother, or they were simply genetic, codes of DNA by which June's life and habbits would be determined, one thing, in this case, is for certain: daughters and mothers are alike. It can be seen in everyday life, and Amy Tan beautifully describes and exhibits this fact in her portrayl of the stories involving June and her mother.