Amy Tan was born in United States in 1952, only a few years after her parents moved from China. Her mother, Daisy, is actually the most influential character to her daughter’s life. She left behind her three daughters in China after divorce, and became a nurse after being remarried to John, Amy’s father. Those three daughters that Daisy had left behind became the main motive for Amy to write ‘Joy Luck Club’, after all. The Tan family belonged to a small social community in United States, which was made by Asian immigrant families to share their American Dream among themselves. Their main activity was playing the stock market, and sharing their daily life stories. When Amy was 15, her father and older brother died of brain tumors in the same …show more content…
This book is consisted of short stories of 4 daughter and mothers. Each and every characters have different personalities and family history, mostly back in China, which is the main factor that contributes to the content’s richness. The character that leads the main story is ‘June’, the daughter of Suyuan. Her story first starts with the death of her mother, reminiscing the memories with her. She starts a long journey of finding her twin elder sisters, whom her mother had left behind when leaving China due to Japanese invasion. This is the exact motif the author has brought from her mother’s experience, leaving behind her 3 daughters after divorce and moving to United States. From this fact, I was able to imply that the author did have some kind of bond to her half-siblings, wishing to find them in the future. In the end, she was able to meet her twin sisters with the help from the other 3 mothers in the story. Another important character to look upon is Ying Ying, a lady who doesn’t usually smile and always seems gloomy. Her personality actually results from her past experience marrying to a rich family at a young age, which became a huge trauma for her. As this story is influential as well, Ying Ying’s life story is illustrated in detail in Amy Tan’s another novel, ‘The Moon Lady.’ In this critical response as a reader, I would like to discuss two main themes of this book and several important symbols that the writer used to imply the past, present and the future of each
Suyuan’s Heroism The Joy Luck Club written by Amy Tan affects the relationship of four mothers and their daughters. Throughout their journeys of figuring out one another, they each learned a new quality about themselves. “The Hero’s Adventure,” written by Joseph Campbell, demonstrates how a person goes through a cycle to be claimed as a hero for another person who needs saving. Tan’s novel describes how each of the heroes went through all four phases of the hero's journey.
In both the stories, in which both families include a mother who is the first generation immigrant and the daughter who is an American citizen, their relation is very complex because of their distinct thinking. Jing-Mei’s mother has always had a very high expectation for Jing-Mei. Her mother
Thesis Statement: In the short story, Two Kinds, Amy Tan develops a narrator who as a child seeks her mother’s approval of her, but develops into a child with her own mind, and by the end of the story embodies a woman who realizes that her mother has her own expression of love for her daughter. Thus, Amy Tan depicts a message about Jing-Mei, the narrator, accepting that everyone, especially her mother, has their own expressions of love. This will look different depending on who a person is and their background. Even though Jing-Mei does not always feel her mother loves her, she learns that her mother loves her by reflecting on her childhood and struggles.
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.
Regardless of social class or wealth, rich or poor, women in the 1930’s China were always inferior to men. Women were treated more like objects and possessions rather than humans, when it came to marriage. Women had no say in almost anything, they couldn’t object or disapprove a marriage they were matched in, most were treated with little or no respect from their husbands, the ones that were treated with respect were a rare bunch. Even women from the highest class, had once been treated as mere servants to their needy husbands, only to do nothing but obey, in the name of honor, luck, wealth, and reputation for their families.
Through analyzing the stories about their lives’ hardships and experiences, it is revealed that Suyuan’s American Dream is achieved by Jing-mei by going back to her own country, retrieving her two sisters, and makes the family whole again. The story of Suyuan and Jing-mei chasing their American Dream teaches us a lesson: Never gives up your dreams casually. One day, you will be thankful for your persistence, when the dream comes
For instance, her famous novel ‘The Joy Luck Club’ depicts the Chinese mother and her American daughter relationship where they go through various circumstances trying to understand each other including the evolvement that comes in their relationships as the daughters know more about their mother’s life stories. Secondly, Tan considers the theme of identity in terms of Chinese immigrants and their life experiences as an immigrant in the United States. She reveals how the children born to the immigrants strive in an environment which is a mixture of American and Chinese influence. Moreover, Tan is found to have explored identity issues through her fictive creations and tackled the issue of authorial identity (Becnel, 2010). Similarly, romantic love is another subject included in the literary artworks of Amy Tan which considers the relationships and romance an important aspect of human’s life.
The Rebellious Daughter: Analyzing the Theme of Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” 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.
In these novels it is clearly seen that this form of writing is important in retaining and embracing a person’s and or a group’s cultural Identity. This paper is going to focus on the importance of talk-story. Maxine Hong Kingston uses talk-story to tell the stories of her childhood in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. In using this form Kingston learns how to retain the customs of The Old China ways that her parents, especially her mother tells her and her siblings about. Kingston having been born in
Thesis Statement about theme of literary work- In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, expressions of love and hatred are shown in multiple mother-daughter relationships resulting in negative impacts such as pain, bitterness, and regret because of their differing opinions. Support Point #1- Suyuan Woo guiltily leaves her twin daughters on the ground in China as she walks away in tears.
In the words of Jing-Mei in the last line of the story, “Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish” (Tan 159). Throughout her life, Suyuan, their mother, held onto the hope that she would see her daughters again. In this hope, she named Jing-Mei in connection to her sisters, keeping the “long-cherished wish” that someday her daughters would reconcile and complete their family circle. The occasion that
“Communication is the key to a successful relationship, attentiveness, and consistency. Without it, there is no relationship,” (Bleau). The Joy Luck Club is a novel written by Amy Tan. Set in the twentieth century, this novel depicts the life of four Chinese immigrant women escaping their past and their American-grown daughters. The novel reveals the mothers’ hardship-filled past and motivations alongside with the daughters’ inner conflicts and struggles.
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.
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American author who was born on February 19, 1952, in Oakland, California. In Tan’s early life she had many struggles because her parents desired for her “to hold onto Chinese traditions and her own longings to become more Americanized” (Encyclopedia). While she wanted to become a writer when she was still young, her parents wanted her to become a neurosurgeon. When she got older and went to college she majored in English then started her career in the 1970’s. She was a technical writer and then started writing fiction stories.
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.