Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is the fist book published by Amy Tan in 1989, which presents the stories of four Chinese-immigrant women and their American-born daughters. She wrote this book because she wanted to understand her own relationship with her mother. In her book, there are some generation differences experienced by mothers and daughter, and a mother-daughter story by a writer whose own mother wanted her to be anything but a writer. The novel tells the stories of new waves of immigrants who are changing and enrich America, especially the generation that was born America. Therefore, the cultural distinctions, motherhood and marriage are the main ideas that she wants to illustrate.

The novel contains four stories and each one explores the relationship between the mother and their daughter at the same stage. The first immigrants like their parents were all born in China and they accepted the traditional Chinese culture, while the American born children obtain different education than their parents. So, these differences became the focus of contradictions. In the women’s study course, we talked about culture in the first class, which is the way of living which a group of people has developed and transmits from one generation to the next. The mothers in the Joy Luck Club expected their daughters to obey their elders and so learn by obedience, by observation and by imitation, as they did in China. However, in America, the mothers’ warnings were not supported by the context of American culture, so their daughters did not understand. At this time, the communication between American daughters and Chinese mothers became a big problem. The Chinese mothers from a continuity with their mothers in China and they also try their best to establish a connection with their American daughters. Furthermore, In this case, the mothers suffered loss, which ranged from separation to abandonment to rejection in the mother-daughter relationship and in the male-female relationship. For example, She wrote “My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more” (Page 27).

In addition, the novel also inferred marriage problems between Chinese and American culture. For the mothers, the marriage meant permanent and it not always based on love, which was a social necessity that they must secretly undermine in order to be happy. On the other hand, for the daughters, marriage was supposed by the true loves and love went forward through generations of females. However, like the mothers, they were are to understand and find true love in their marriages. Rather, they must break up their marriages to find themselves. It is also the culture distinctions between Chinese and American. For example, An-mei’s mother is raped by her future husband, so she must marry him to preserve her honor. While, his husband can marry any number of concubines without being judged. In America, the daughters would also encounter sexism as they grow up. Women were more respected by the male and the gender roles became proactive.

Throughout the novel of The Joy Luck Club, I learned more about culture distinctions between Chinese and American, especially on the viewpoint of love, marriage, and social identities. Amy Tan used the stories about Chinese immigrants and their American daughters to express her own relationship with her mother. She used different cultures between Chinese and American to illustrate the contradictions between mothers and daughters. The more mothers expected they daughter obey, the more they cannot understanding each other. That is the culture distinctions problems which embarrass the relationship between mothers and daughters and obstruct the connections between them.