Error In Translation In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

The American Literature consists of artists from various cultural and social background who devoted their life in literary works. There are number of female authors who are known for their magnificent writings. Sarah Winnemucca, Zora Neale Hurston and Amy Tan are some of the famous female American authors. They belong to different racial and cultural backgrounds but share a common ground when it comes to expressing their life experience and opinions through their literary art works. Moreover, they are thought to be the public figures who have contributed to American literature over the past decades. The authors mentioned above have their own writing

The story “Two Kinds” is from the book The Joy Luck Club. The story mainly focuses on the relationships between mothers and daughters. Internal conflict means that it is a conflict a character has with his or her self. Throughout every storyline there is either an internal or external conflict. Two Kind by Amy Tan has a variation of both. Both Jing-mei and her mother faces each form of conflict and they are revealed throughout the story.

It consisted of sixteen related stories about the experiences of four Chinese-American mother-daughter pairs. According to Dong in Reading Amy Tan, “Daisy’s tragic experiences directly inspired the stories of the characters An-mei Hsu and Suyuan Woo in The Joy Luck Club” (Dong 3). The character Suyuan Woo in The Joy Luck Club was a woman who was born into a wealthy family, married an officer in the army, and gives birth to twin girls; she later lost this family during the Sino-Japanese war. Suyuan narrated, “The man who was my husband brought me and our two babies to Kweilin because he thought we would be safe. He was an officer with the Kuomintang” (Tan 21). Daisy was an inspiration to this character as she was also born into a wealthy family, married an air force pilot, and have had daughters from her previous marriage. Furthermore, the character of An-mei also has a similarity to Daisy’s life. An-mei’s character had a flashback into her childhood, “when I was a young girl in China, my grandmother told me my mother was a ghost. This did not mean my mother was dead. In those days, a ghost was anything we were forbidden to talk about” (Tan 42). An-mei was a member of the Joy Luck club with a mother who was widowed and disowned by her family when she remarried as a man’s fourth wife. Similarly, Daisy influenced this character as her mother was a young widow, who was raped by a very rich and powerful man and later became the very wealthy and powerful man’s mistress. In Amy’s other written works, some of the characters were also based on her mother’s life. However, this was not the only way Daisy influenced Amy’s

The American Dream is something all immigrants dream of achieving when arriving to the United States. But what exactly is the American Dream? Some believe it to be the long-term achievement of a goal through hard work, while others see it as a new opportunity to redo life. The emphasis and interpretation of the American Dream changes between generations because it evolves with a sense of individuality in the new era of citizens, as they lack the background that deprived older generations their rights, which made them crave success and achievement when arriving to America, as illustrated by the relationship of Suyuan and Jing-Mei Woo.

For first generation Americans, finding belonging in a new country can feel impossible. They are often caught between the traditions and ideals of the two differing countries. Raising a family in the new home with different values can lead to miscommunications or even a significant disconnect between parents and children. This is modeled well in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, particularly in the relationship between Ying Ying Saint Clair and her daughter Lena. The prejudice Ying Ying Saint Clair feels for American culture causes her to have a difficult time understanding and communicating with her daughter.

The story “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan explores the deep familial emotions between a mother and her daughter. Jing-Mei’s mother had left China to come to America after losing her family, and had been raising Jing-Mei in America with her second husband. Despite her mother’s grand hopes for Jing-Mei to become successful in America by becoming a child prodigy, Jing-Mei did not share the same opinions. This disagreement quickly became a source of resentment and anger for both of them, but Jing-Mei and her mother were unable to resolve this conflict because of their different backgrounds and experiences. The story showcases how relationships between mothers and daughters can be strained because of differences in culture and a lack of communication.

Jing-Mei then decides to reunite with her sisters in China, anxiously stating, “I lay awake thinking about my mother’s story, realizing how much I have never known about her, grieving that my sisters and I had both lost her“ (271). At this point in the story, it becomes evident Jing-Mei no longer despises her mother for her distasteful tendencies. Instead, she aspires to see her mother one last time. Remorseful of her incapacity to connect with her mother on a deeper level, Jing-Mei feels inept to fill in for her mother at the mahjong table. Michelle Gaffner also notes the tension put on relationships due to cultural indifferences in her article “Negotiating the Geography of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club” when she writes, “The mother-daughter relationships in both China and the United States represented in The Joy Luck Club not only provide a link between the past and the present but also suggest how the ability, or the inability, for mothers and daughters to share geographically informed cultural stories influences both mother-daughter relationships and individual and cultural identity” (83). The

Growing up to be a decent human being is not easy. Experiences that are teachable moments can be comfortable or may be hurtful. People construe harmless events into catastrophic disasters. Amy Tan, Chinese American author, interprets her Christmas celebration to be an unpleasant event. In “Fish Cheeks,” Amy Tan uses diction and details to reveal her embarrassment of being Chinese.

Racial stigmas and stereotypes have negative effects on a multitude of ethnic groups. Across our nation, members of numerous races experience difficulties surrounding their identity and inability to refine their English dialects. Anna Marie Quindlen, an American author, journalist, and New York Times columnist, once said, “Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center...but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality”. Quindlen’s viewpoint is skillfully displayed in “Mother Tongue”, a first person narration by an Asian-American woman, Amy Tan. The obstacles she encountered based on her mother’s struggle with English significantly affected their identities in our society. Overall, it is

In her writing, Tan often describes her experiences as the child of Chinese immigrants, growing up in northern California and living in American culture. Tan explains how she has learned to embrace the many Englishes her mother speaks and how her background has also caused her to have different Englishes. While others classify her mother's English as "broken" she finds no fault in it. In Tan's view, just because something is broken does not necessarily mean that it is in need of fixing. In her essay, author Amy Tan addresses the connections between languages and cultures in describing the different Englishes her mother uses. Tan is able to convey the power of language in her writing through the significance of the title "Mother Tongue", by narrating from three different perspectives and through her diction.

Mother knows best. And yet so many daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club feel slighted by what the matriarchal figures in their lives have in mind for them, or rather, what they believe their mothers have in mind for them. A perfect storm of expectation, true and false, about love, about success, about being Chinese. The souring of mother-daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club stem from unrealistic or ill conceived expectations that both parties hold for the other.

The difference in language leads to miscommunication but the overlying consequence of it is lack of understanding and empathy for one another which leads to conflict. “Language takes on a metonymic relation to culture in Tan's portrayal of the gap between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club.” (Hamilton). The language barriers between the daughters and the mothers create the cultural barriers. Language barriers emphasize and directly influences cultural barriers. Cultural barriers prevent communication between people from all around the world, especially between the mothers and the daughters, and not necessarily figuratively. The language barrier between the mothers and the daughters can be symbolic.The lack of understanding and comprehension for one another creates a language barrier between the mothers and the daughters. “These kinds of explanations made me feel my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did. I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese.” (Tan 84). Peoples' communicating leads to the spread of different ideas. Language connects societies figuratively and literally. Culture and language influence people extensively which allow people to be susceptible to miscommunication when a barrier is too vast. Familial relationships disrupt from language barriers. “Divergent perceptions and absence of a common language of communication ...they fail to fathom each other’s feelings and likes and dislikes” (Priya). Miscommunication between people creates rifts and lays pretense for tension and dispassion. Without communication, people become impatient and disassociate. “They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English”(Tan 31). Apprehension creates misunderstanding. Apathy negates relationships and destroys any chance of understanding.

“Two Kinds,” by Amy Tan, essentially revolves around the struggle of Jing Mei and her constant conflict with her mother. Throughout her life, she is forced into living a life that is not hers, but rather her mom’s vision of a perfect child; because her mother lost everything, which included her parents and kids, so her only hope was through Jing Mei. Jing Mei’s mom watches TV shows such as the Ed Sullivan Show, which gives her inspiration that her daughter should be like the people and actors. First her mom saw how on the television a three-year-old boy can name all the capitals of the states and foreign countries and would even pronounce it correctly. Her mom would quiz Jing Mei on capitals of certain places, only to discover that she would

In her novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan focuses on the fact that the bond between a mother and daughter can overcome any ethnic barrier. Despite there being many disagreements and arguments about the ways to live their lives, Tan defies this issue by creating a bond that is unbreakable even though the experienced different upbringings. Certain disagreements keep the novel interesting and create a conflict depicting the problems stemming from this barrier. Through her use of similes, metaphors, and flashbacks, Tan shows how the bond between a mother and daughter can withstand even the strongest cultural differences.

To begin with, the ever-present pattern of disconnect between the two groups of women is used to show how drastically differently they were raised. For example, in China, Suyuan hoped for a better life for her next daughter, June. She believed that June could do whatever she wanted to do as long as she set her mind to it. However, June doesn’t have the same blind faith that her mother does in the American Dream. We can see the visible disconnect this produces between the two of them in piano lessons, college, and even Suyuan’s death. It tears them apart and creates such a wall between them that June says that she doesn’t even know what her mother was like. Another example is where Lindo was telling Waverly about how similar the two of them were. They were finally starting to overcome that long standing barrier that they both put up long ago. Then, Waverly mistaken Taiyuan, Lindo’s home, as Taiwan. This slammed the boundary