In the face of death or survival, one must distinguish between a potential threat and a trustful ally. In our current society survival is often assured, leaving no need for people to discriminate against others. Despite this, we judge and attack each other, achieving nothing and turning friends into foes. Breaking this habit may be hard, and seeing others’ perspectives and backgrounds is sometimes belittling, yet ultimately humbling. Empathy and tolerance grow through understanding others’ backgrounds and forgiving their mistakes. Through our own lives and the lives of characters in literature, we can learn from others’ mistakes and see their point of view. Humanity benefits from Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club due to the mature writing style and the …show more content…
The Joy Luck Club’s collection of short stories effectively communicates the different women's pasts and perspectives through different narrators, each with a different tone. Ying-Ying St. Clair’s regrets of “remaining quiet for so long [that her] daughter does not hear [her]” contribute to her bashful, yet wise tone (67). Conversely, her daughter, Lena St. Clair, was “comforted… somewhat to think that” others around her “had a more unhappy life” and held a naive and honest tone (113). Differing narrators’ juxtaposing tones create stark differences in perspectives and backgrounds, which is similar to the product of antithesis. These differences encourage the reader to fully consider the differences in background and viewpoints and adds a level of humanity to the characters. Ultimately, switching narrators switches perspectives and prose styles and encourages the reader to fully understand the characters’ reasonings for their actions. Additionally, the beautiful, flourishing imagery and figurative language transports the reader into The Joy Luck Club. An-Mei’s life felt as if she “had fallen out of the bowels of a stupid goose, two eggs that nobody wanted” (42). This metaphor provides the reader with a strong, clear image of the rejection that An-Mei faced as a child. Tan’s connotative language brings the characters’ perspectives to life and provides an emotional connection to the characters’ lives and struggles. Her fully immersive writing style encourages the reader to empathize with the characters. The reader can easily tolerate the characters’ odd behaviors when he or she can justify their actions through past experiences. Tan’s mature and unique writing style allows readers to understand empathy and coexistence through her literature and carry this through their lives to better strive to
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 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.
Please refer to the book, “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan. Turn to page 35(for those with the red cover version by the series editor, Judith Baxter) and refer to the story ‘Scar’.
Throughout the novel, The Joy Luck Club, author Amy Tan explores the issues of tradition and change and the impact they have on the bond between mothers and daughters. The theme is developed through eight women that tell their separate stories, which meld into four pairs of mother-daughter relationships.
The Joy Luck Club, is a film that shows a powerful portrayal of four Chinese women and the lives of their children in America. The film presents the conflicting cultures between the United States and China, and how men treat women throughout their lives. People living in the United States usually take for granted their roles as a male or female. The culture of each country shapes the treatment one receives based on the sex of the individual. Gender roles shape this movie and allows people, specifically the United States, to see how gender are so crutcial in othe countries.
... of Daughters': Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in The Joy Luck Club." Critical Insights: The Joy Luck Club. N.p.: Salem, 2010. 113-44. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 15 Oct. 2013.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, describes the lives of four Asian women who
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.
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
Many women find that their mothers have the greatest influence on their lives and the way their strengths and weaknesses come together. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters are followed through vignettes about their upbringings and interactions. One of the mothers, An-Mei Hsu, grows up away from her mother who has become the 4th wife of a rich man; An-Mei is forced to live with her grandmother once her mother is banned from the house, but eventually reunites and goes to live in the man’s house with her mother. Her daughter, Rose, has married an American man, Ted, but their marriage begins to end as he files for divorce; Rose becomes depressed and unsure what to do, despite her mother’s advice. An-Mei has strengths and weaknesses that shape her own courageous actions, and ultimately have an influence on her daughter.
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, by Amy Tan is a piece of literature that displays the power of femininity. Through the past couple of centuries the role that women play in society has drastically changed. Women in various societies have experienced turmoil due to being discriminated against and looked down upon often. Women were viewed upon as being the house caregiver and leaving majority of the other jobs in society to men. Women have moved up the social ladder, politics, jobs, and in households. Femininity is shown throughout The Joy Luck Club. These women each have their own life experiences and stories but through it all they remained strong. Rules and regulations for women in China were very restrictive. Women had to live up to the ideal model of being obedient, hard working, bearing children, hide her unhappiness, and to not complain about anything. In China the women had little worth and were only seen as valuable to their immediate family members. Most of the mothers left China for the reason of improving their daughter’s lives in America. The novel demonstrates various characteristics of how women are represented. The theme of women is demonstrated through the hardships experienced, ethics and self-worth.
Criticism isn't as bad as it always seems,mostly people think of it instantly as censure,striation,negative judgment e.t.c. In the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan teaches many life lessons to experience with the differences between their mothers and daughters,not every fictional characters story are as compatible to most. Tan argues as each reveal secrets,trying to unravel the certitude about her life the strings become more tangled as unsecured the secrets become.
The Joy Luck Club portrays strong women. The examples that come across most strikingly to the reader are the women who lived in traditional China. An-Mei Hsu gained her strong will from her mother's weak spirit. In her story, titled "Magpies," An-Mei's mother is forced into the life of a concubine. Her mother is tricked by Wu Tsing, a rich merchant, and is brutally raped. Second Wife's trickery lures An-Mei's mother into a life in which she is forced to bear a son that she cannot claim as her own. As a last resort, An-Mei's mother commits suicide two days before the Chinese New Year, in order to ensure that her daughter can someday rise above the position of a concubine's daughter. An-Mei's mother, as the poison travels through her body, whispers, "I would rather kill my own weak spirit so I can give you a stronger one."
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.