Amy Tan’s novel ‘The Joy Luck Club’ focuses on the experiences of a group of women from different generations who gather to play mah-jong in San Francisco. From immigrant Asian background, the women share the stories of their lives, covering the treatment and mis-treatment of Asian immigrants throughout twentieth century US history. However, for many readers ‘The Joy Luck Club’ remains a powerful evocation of the experiences of a section of society – immigrant Asian women – who have for many years lacked a clear and cohesive public voice. While the novel has many important themes that would be worthy of a feminist analysis, such as mother-daughter relationships, romantic relationships, a discussion on the importance of space and place is important.
To begin with, social theorist Manuel Castells (2000) has argued
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They change through time, depending on whether the inhabitants leave, sometimes for good, it is ‘’a map of the relations between strangers and household members as well as to familial and gender relations’’ (McDowell 1999). The home, having such an important role, in the end is won by Rose. This changes not only the ownership, but the dynamic of the relationships within and with the home. While it was previously Their house, it is now Her house. Rose not only made her husband take her more seriously with this win, proving herself of more of his equal, but she has also shown that The Stranger (the mistress) can not take her place.
Going back to the Joy Luck Club, it has become a space of what anthropologist James Clifford (1997) would call a ‘’translocal identity’’. While the term has several definitions, some more conservative than others, we could sat that translocality is essentially ‘’being identified with more than one location’’ (Oakes and Schein 2006) and ‘’a space in which new forms of (post)national identity are constituted’’ (Mandaville
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.
This nation was relatively stable in the eyes of immigrants though under constant political and economic change. Immigration soon became an outlet by which this nation could thrive yet there was difficulty in the task on conformity. Ethnic groups including Mexicans and Chinese were judged by notions of race, cultural adaptations and neighborhood. Mary Lui’s “The Chinatown Trunk Mystery” and Michael Innis-Jimenez’s “Steel Barrio”, provides a basis by which one may trace the importance of a neighborhood in the immigrant experience explaining the way in which neighborhoods were created, how these lines were crossed and notions of race factored into separating these
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.
‘The Harmful Myth of Asian Superiority’ by Ronald Takaki and ‘Growing up Asian in America’ by Kesaya E. Noda are both essays that depict the state of Asian immigrants in America. The authors are both Asian Americans themselves and their words bear fruit from a lifetime of personal experiences of being a viewed upon as an alien in their own land.
When Chinese immigrants enter the United States of America, it is evident from the start that they are in a world far different than their homeland. Face to face with a dominant culture that often times acts and thinks in ways contrary to their previous lives, immigrants are on a difficult path of attempting to become an American. Chinese immigrants find themselves often caught between two worlds: the old world of structured, traditional and didactic China and the new world of mobile, young and prosperous America. They nostalgically look back at China longing for a simpler life but look at the United States as a land of opportunity and freedom that they did not know in China. For this is why they came to America in the first place, to provide for their children and themselves what they could not in China. To do this, of course, they are faced with the challenge of assimilating. Learning the language, acquiring education, owning property, etc. are all ways to seize the American Dream. However this poses a problem for the Chinese immigrant for, in the process of assimilation, they lose some of their Chinese culture. This especially rings true for the children of Chinese immigrants: the second-generation Chinese Americans.
Reviewing the whole book, it is clear that The Joy Luck Club is a link to intergenerational and intercultural connections. Tan said that "To my mother and the memory of her mother you asked me once what I would remember this, and much more." The novel develops with mother and daughter and Tan understands the special bonds between women. The Joy Luck Club is set in San Francisco's Chinatown, but much of it occurs in the flashbacks to the mothers' lives in China. As a result, we become familiar with three different times and places: China, where the mothers grew up, San Francisco, where the daughters and mothers live, and America in general place.
Poetry is a form of literature that some view as obsolete in the modern world, but in the poem “To the Man Who Shouted ‘I Like Pork Fried Rice’ at Me on the Street”, Franny Choi dispels that belief. She uses poetry as a medium to convey her own personal experience with the stereotyping and fetishization of Asian American women, which is an issue that millions of Asian American women still face today. When considering Choi’s background as a Korean American woman and how that has shaped her identity and philosophy, we see how being an Asian American woman is intrinsically a core part of her work, which is why much of her work is about breaking the stereotypes that come with this identity.
Print. The. national identity, n. OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. The Web.
In the novel, The Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan, uses figurative language to create an effect on the readers. Tan uses similes, metaphors, and symbolism, to add to the overall message of the relationships between mother and daughter and bond between them that has been inherited. However, Tan also uses language to show the connection between storytelling, memories, and inheritance.
Knott , Kim, and Seán McLoughlin, eds. Diasporas Concepts, Intersections, Identities. New York : Zed Books, 2010. Print.
Shear, Walter. Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club. An excerpt from Critique, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring 1993). 1993. Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.
Xu, Ben. “Memory and the Ethnic Self; Reading Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club” in Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures. 261-77.
Throughout Asian American literature there is a struggle between Asian women and their Asian American daughters. This is the case in The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan and also in the short story "Waiting for Mr. Kim," written by Carol Roh-Spaulding. These two stories are very different, however they are similar in that they portray Asian women trying to get their American daughters to respect their Asian heritage. There are certain behaviors that Asian women are expected to have, and the mothers feel that their daughters should use these behaviors.
Gish Jen’s In the American Society is, on the surface, an entertaining look into the workings of a Chinese American family making their way in America. The reader is introduced to the life of a Chinese American restaurant owner and his family through the eyes of his American-born daughter. When we examine the work in depth, however, we discover that Jen is addressing how traditional Chinese values work in American culture. She touches on the difference in gender roles, generation gaps between immigrants and their American-born children, and the hesitance of these immigrants to conform to the American way of life.
Sadly, the characters revealed in The Joy Luck Club have personal histories so complicated by cultural and emotional misunderstandings that their lives are spent in failed attempts to cross the chasms created by these circumstances.