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The Joy Luck Club

Decent Essays

Cultural differences often cause divides between people. Within social groups people tend to gravitate towards those that share similar traits; so when, within a family unit, there are cultural differences the relationships gain a distance that eventually hinders the intimacy that is usually seen in families. The mother-daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club exemplify the distance that can be caused by these cultural divides. Amy Tan uses families built of Chinese immigrants and first generation Chinese-American children to display the cultural disparities between China and America and the effects such disparity has on the individuals within those families. Each mother-daughter relationship in The Joy Luck Club exemplifies a characteristic …show more content…

The Woo family focuses on the cultural differences June Woo faces as she explores her mother’s culture in the wake of her mother’s death. The differences she faces are common among first generation Chinese Americans; often “[c]omparative studies have consistently characterized Chinese parents as highly restrictive and controlling, or ‘authoritarian,’ where unquestioned obedience to authority is stressed” while “[a]mong Euro-Americans, an authoritarian parenting style has been associated with mixed consequences for child development” (Gorman 73). These contrasting attitudes on parenting cause conflict in teaching young first generation Chinese Americans as their parents may want to follow a more strict parenting style, yet American culture puts emphasis on individualism, which would hinder the obedience-driven structure of traditional …show more content…

The St. Claire family is used to give a differentiating cultural make up of an immigrant Chinese / Chinese American family as only one parent is a Chinese immigrant while the other is American. This allows for Amy Tan to present cultural rifts and complications within communication. Lena St. Claire is used to represent the complications of language brokering as it appears in cross-cultural scenarios. The experience of language brokering is common among immigrant families as “children often … acquire fluency in English at a faster rate than their parents, [and] are expected to broker for their parents by translating for them” ultimately leading the child to be in a position of power in the parent-child relationship (Chao 271). The power position that is held by the child can “lead to brokers [, the child,] having diminished respect for and [diminished] identification with parents as authority figures and role models” which then can lead to rifts within the parent-child relationship (Chao 275). Amy Tan’s character Lena is put in the language brokering position as her father does not speak any form of Chinese. This ultimately puts Lena in a place of power, giving her leeway to modify her mother’s statements when she is translating (Tan 112). This power in the relationship leads to Lena seeing her mother as “crazy” and ultimately losing, not all but some, respect for her mother (Tan

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