Theme Of Sexism In The Joy Luck Club

The relationship a mother has with her daughter is one of the most significant relationships either person will possess. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the stories of four mothers and their respective daughters are established through vignettes, which reveal the relationships between them. Throughout the novel, the mothers and daughters are revealed to be similar, yet different. Lindo and Waverly Jong can be compared and contrasted through their upbringings, marriages, and personalities.

 In the Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan, focuses on mother-daughter relationships. She examines the lives of four women who emigrated from China, and the lives of four of their American-born daughters. The mothers: Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-Ying St. Clair had all experienced some life-changing horror before coming to America, and this has forever tainted their perspective on how they want their children raised. The four daughters: Waverly, Lena, Rose, and Jing-Mei are all Americans. Even though they absorb some of the traditions of Chinese culture they are raised in America and American ideals and values.  This inability to communicate and the clash

    Amy Tan's immensely popular novel, The Joy Luck Club explores the issues faced by first and second generation Chinese immigrants, particularly mothers and daughters. Although Tan's book is a work of fiction, many of the struggles it describes are echoed in Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographical work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The pairs of mothers and daughters in both of these books find themselves separated along both cultural and generational lines. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs, and geographic loyalty. The gulf between these women is sadly acknowledged by Ying-ying St. Clair when she says of

Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships.  The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had.  In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture).  They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life.  These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3).  To

    With all the cultural clashes that the mothers and daughters are facing in The Joy Luck Club, it is hard for the characters to have a sense of identity. The daughters are torn between Chinese and American culture and are trying to figure out who they are. The daughters are also trying to figure out who their mothers are and how that affects them. The mothers have two lives, the ones they live in America and the ones that they left behind in

Lena and Ying-Ying from Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club both face injustice in their patriarchal relationships, just as Mariam and Laila from A Thousand Splendid Suns, however on very different terms. Lena, like Amir and Laila, struggles with confrontation and complete deference of others. However, under the influence of her mother, Lena realizes the problematic recurrences in relationship with her husband. Ying-Ying, aware of her daughters submissiveness, must lead Lena to intervention to confront herself and reconnect with her Chinese heritage in order to save her struggling relationships. While Ying-Ying sees the imbalance in Lena and Harold’s relationship as an embodiment of the flaws in her own marriage she reflects on her past and thinks to herself, “So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. The pain that cut my spirit loose. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughters tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose” (Tan, 153). She has sacrificed so much for her daughter, Lena, and accepts her American ways despite the fact that broadens the cultural gap between her Chinese heritage. Ying-Ying already experienced her loss of identity and self through her own marriage because she was unable to be assertive towards her husband. Here, just like Mariam and Hassan in Hosseni’s novels, Ying-Ying gives up her freedom in order for Lena to live a better life than she had. Although Ying-Ying doesn’t give up

Communication between generations has always been an issue and with that, a misunderstanding of the past and culture comes along. In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, she shows the stories of four Chinese mothers and their American born daughters. Throughout the novel, the characters encounter both external and internal conflicts in order to contrast the different relationships held by the mothers and daughters with their past and where they came from. The mother-daughter pair of Lindo and Waverly Jong shows the gap between the generations very clearly. Everything is different, from language to name to marriage.

The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan's first novel. It consists of four sections with sixteen short stories. One of the main issues of the novel is the relationship between Chinese mothers and their Chinese – American daughters. ‘‘Your mother is in your bones.’’ (Tan 1998, 30) There is a cultural chasm between them because of the difference in the way they were brought up and different influences of the environment.

She wants the audience to know right away that even though she is about to tell you the story of a difficult childhood, she did reach her goal in the end. After making this statement, Tan dives into her past and how she came to be where she is today. Her mother is the next most important point of discussion. Her mother influenced her writing style as well as her beliefs about her culture and heritage. ?Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her? (Tan, 2002, p. 36). The broken up English her mother uses is the next issue Tan focuses on. ??everything is limited, including people?s perceptions of the limited English speaker? (Tan, 2002, p. 36). Lastly, she talks about her education and the role it had on her deciding what she wanted to do with her life. ?Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me? (Tan, 2002, p. 39). By structuring the essay in order of importance, Tan reinforces her message that you can be anything you desire even with a different culture than the norm.

In the story “Lena St. Clair: Rice Husband,” Lena and her husband,

Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” is a novel written in various short stories between four immigrant Chinese mothers and their four Chinese-American born daughters. The mother’s represent their heritage, tradition, culture, and native tongue. Their daughters; however embody America and its culture, along with language. Each mother and daughter share the emotional feeling of cultural separation between themselves and their relationship with each other. With their cross-cultural relationship, the daughters are at a stance with their mother, her upbringing, and wisdom. Through the mother’s stories, Amy Tan convey’s cross-cultural relationships amongst the mothers’ and daughters through symbolism and anecdotes. By facing disadvantages each mother learns to become strong through their own struggle and have become protective of their daughters from pain that they had endured in China. Although, with the daughters being brought up in a cross-cultural environment, primarily American culture, they ironically mistake their mother 's’ guidance and love as judgement. They feel pressured and criticized by their mothers and correlate it as an inability to understand the American Culture.

    The complexitities of any mother-daughter relationship go much deeper then just their physical features that resemble one another.  In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, the stories of eight Chinese women are told.  Together this group of women forms four sets of mother and daughter pairs. The trials and triumphs, similarities and differences, of each relationship with their daughter are described, exposing the inner makings of four perfectly matched pairs.  Three generations of the Hsu family illustrate how both characteristics and

In the best-selling novel, The Joy Luck Club was inspired by author Amy Tan’s personal life conflicts. She presents the story in exploration as an Asian American, who has troubles accepting her Chinese heritage, and her relationship with her estranged mother. The novel explores the relationship between four traditional Chinese mothers and their four Americanized Chinese American daughters. Amy Tan shares the clash of mother and daughter relationships based on heritage and traditional, new and old. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have similarities in the daughter and mother relationship. The relationship between mothers and daughters are always a connection rather the relationship is good or bad. This paper will review Tolstoy, Austen, Tan’s story, as well as main arguments and evaluation of Tan’s writing technique and main focus on the relationship theme between mother and daughter. The essay will focus on the reasons of if the mother’s ways and the rebelling of the daughters.

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club tells the story of the hopes and dreams of immigrant mothers and their first generation daughters in America. June is the daughter of Suyuan, who

The novel Joy Luck Club is set in San Francisco around Chinese American immigrant families. The novel is composed of four sections containing separate narratives interweaving stories to demonstrating the conflict Chinese immigrant mother are having raising daughters in America. The focus of the novel is cultural translation and the problems immigrants face with their identity. Several themes in the novel that are the main focus, theses themes are mother daughter relationships, tradition, language, sacrifice, fate, sexism and power. As the novel starts Jing-mei “June” Woo, one of the daughters begins to attend a social group called the Joy Luck Club in her mothers place after her death, there she plays mah jong and listens to the other women share stories about the past. As the novel progresses, Jing-mei ends up coming to an appreciation how rich her heritage is.