Mei Hsu And Suyuan Woo In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Leonardo Da Vinci once stated, “The greatest deception men suffer from is their own opinions.” For eras on end, stereotypes and misconceptions have stood as obstacles preventing individuals from sharing experiences, perspectives, and ideas with one another. Amy Tan further exhibits an individual’s tendency to form preconceived opinions in her novel The Joy Luck Club. The pairing of Chinese mothers and daughters throughout Tan’s novel proposes that deception has a drastic effect on a woman’s life and the manner in which she is perceived.

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.

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.

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.

Research shows that up to 70% of people who have gone through something traumatic, have shown positive psychological growth in their lives (Gregoire). Life after trauma can be hard to regain due to the instability we experience throughout that hard time in our lives. But having a strong, and satisfying relationship or relationships can help to bring people to peace in a slightly more uncomplicated way. This example of dealing with grief is brought to attention in Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club. Due to the turbulent times in Shanghai, China, and then coming together in San Francisco, California, these four women and their daughters rely on each other to get through it all.

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.

However, when Amy learns that his family is coming to dinner, she cries. During the dinner, she is embarrassed because of her loud and rude chinese relatives and the particular Chinese menu that her mother had prepared. She only realizes many years later that “For Christmas Eve that year, she had chosen all my favorite foods,” (1). In this realization, Amy Tan learns that her

Joseph Campbell's definition of a hero’s journey can be seen across many characters in the novel, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. In order to meet this definition, one must overcome three stages: the department, the fulfilment, and the return. Tan depicts Jing-mei Woo as a shell of a woman who is forced to take up the footprints of her late mother. She then learns the meaning of family and is able to fulfil her mother’s dying wish by resurrecting her past life in China, which allows her to complete Campbell's definition of a hero’s journey.

The central male characters in the novel, objectify, oppress, and project their own ideals onto Daisy, which reduces her to the shadow of a character so damaged she is incapable of being her own person. Without any great leaps of faith, one can safely assume that

His struggle in school illustrates how influential family beliefs are to one's identity and perception. Additionally, in the novel "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan, family is a reoccurring thematic element, especially between mother and daughter figures. Waverly, a central daughter, says "I . . . looked in the mirror. . . . I was strong.

In Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, the different stories show how the different characters develop and progress. Rose Hsu Jordan begins “Half and Half” as someone who clearly lacks of conviction as she allows everyone but her to make decisions. Throughout “Without Wood”, however, Rose Hsu Jordan begins to learn, with the help of her mother, how to speak up.

“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.

The experiences related and recorded in the novels The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao, and Obasan by Joy Kogawa give great insight to the internal and external struggles East-Asian immigrants face in the Western World, specifically Chinese-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and Japanese-Canadians. Although the situations have certainly improved since the mid twentieth century, many of the issues and struggles the characters in the novels face are still real and ever-expanding for over five percent of the U.S. population. To

Daisy is a victim of denying what is below the surface. This is seen in many different aspects throughout the novel. By approaching reality in a deeper way, everything will automatically become more complicated in countless ways. Even as readers, we do not know everything there is to know, especially when dealing with Jay Gatsby, but what we do know still manages to be contradicted by the complicated character of Daisy. It is recognizable that Daisy continually denies reality for her own convenience within her individual relationships mainly involving Tom and Gatsby, which deal with Tom’s affair, the situation of Gatsby, the feeling of regret following the realization of her first love, and her past of loving Tom.

Daisy, is a woman which born and married to wealth and she has no values and no purpose in life. Her hope of happiness seems dull when she realizes that she is marrying the wrong person. Early in the novel, Daisy finds out a secret that Tom his husband hiding something from her. Jordan says, “She might have the decency not to telephone him a