Joy Luck Club Character Analysis Essay

Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club is an amazing representation of what Chinese immigrants and their families face. The broad spectrum of the mothers’ and daughters’ stories all connect back to a couple of constantly recurring patterns. These patterns are used to show that how the mothers and daughters were so differently raised affected their relationships with each other, for better and for worse. 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

An-mei found hers in the death of her mother, who found relief from a terrible situation and gave her daughter a huge advantage. Lindo got her strength on her wedding day, when she watched the wind and found a beautiful invisible resistance in it. Lindo later uses her strength to manipulate her ‘family’ into letting her go. They found the will to escape from China and make it to America. Their Chinese circumstances led them to face the truth in themselves sooner rather than later. The one exception to this was Ying ying, who fell apart, and never quite found her