Mother Daughter Relationship In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

In a letter written by Abigail Adams to her son John Quincy Adams who is travelling abroad with his father John Adams , a former United States diplomat, advises her son to take advantage of the opportunity by using his own knowledge and skills to gain wisdom and experience growth in developing his character, persuading him to take his first steps to becoming a leader. There are many rhetorical strategies used by Mrs. Adams to persuade her son, among them are metaphor and affectionate tone, rhetorical question and long and involved sentences , and organizes the essay by using argument. Throughout the letter Abigail Adams uses an affectionate tone to advise her son to make his country and family proud. Mrs. Adams uses words such as “ your ever affectionate mother” (62-63) and “My dear son” throughout the letter. By doing so she is coming across as an affectionate and understanding parent, who wants their child to recognize their full potential. In another example she states, “It will be expected of you my son, that, as you are favored with superior advantages under the instructive eye of a tender parent, you improvement should bear some proportion to your advantages” (21-24). She is reminding

Shame and guilt can go hand in hand, as seen in; Flight, The Glass Castle, and The Joy Luck Club. As the three novels progress, many of the characters suffer with inner shame and guilt. While the characters suffer with these things, it somehow seems to shape and change them. Through the characters hardships and struggles, the theme of shame and guilt emerges.

Joy luck only exist among these mothers is because they 've all went through certain tough experience to finally get to where they are today, where they finally have happiness. Unlike June Woo and the other daughters, they were born in America, they did not need to go through what their mothers have went through. Maybe the word joy luck does not exist in the exact form to these daughters but joy luck does certainly exists in a similar form to them. This is because these daughter grew up with the American culture dominating over their Chinese heritage. As a daughter to an Chinese mother that migrated to America, I understand this tale very well. I on the other hand grew up with the Chinese heritage dominating over America 's culture due to me growing up in Chinatown and went to a Chinese dominated elementary school.

“My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America-America was where all my mother's hopes lay,” (Tan). In this quote from the excerpt we see the views most people have coming to America from another country. “I was just as excited as my mother, I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images,” (Tan). In this quote we can see how the daughter has the same view as her mother concerning their future. Due to their same cultural views and experiences, such as, coming from a hard life in China they have similar views on the world and

Every mother wants what the best for her child, even if that child may not believe so. In her letter to her son, John Quincy Adams, Abigail Adams addresses him during his travels in France and defends the rationale of her previous advice while providing her new advice, and partly demands, on the subjects of honor and duty. Abigail Adams uses emotional appeals in the form of personal repetition, flattering metaphors, and prideful personification in order to advise and persuade her son in his personal growth and appeal to his personal qualities, such as pride of honesty and knowledge, to spur his ambitions and actions.

Parenting has been a long practice that desires and demands unconditional sacrifices. Sacrifice is something that makes motherhood worthwhile. The mother-child relationship can be a standout amongst the most convoluted, and fulfilling, of all connections. Women are fuel by self-sacrifice and guilt - but everyone is the better for it. Their youngsters, who feel adored; whatever is left of us, who are saved disagreeable experiences with adolescents raised without affection or warmth; and mothers most importantly. For, in relinquishing, a mother feels strong and liberal; and in guild she finds the motivation to right wrong.

In a family there are many different roles; there's the role of the mother, the father, the child, the grandparents, then there’s the brothers and sisters. Every single one of those roles has different responsibilities. The father, according to most of society, is supposed to be the breadwinner for the family. However, nowadays the mother is actually quite capable of being the breadwinner just as much of as the father. As they work to show their children what it is to be an adult they are teaching them as well on how to be an active member of society. As a child we watch our parents and we learn from them. We learn how to cook, how to clean, how to raise children, how to do right from wrong, how to work, how to do things we don't want to, how to be happy, how to have fun, and many more things.

Some people might argue that a child’s upbringing forms the child’s foundation of life. It forms the child’s identity and its view of life. The upbringing of children is a wide concept because it is never the same. The question is if there is an edge between upbringing and torture. The intention of upbringing is indisputable – you want your children to have a great life and a great future, but perchance certain ways of educating children can cause more damage than good.

Everyone is different. We all have our own personalities and we all take different directions in our lives. People often find themselves lost in this giant world and feel as if they can't share what they are truly thinking or feeling. They hide their personalities and shield themselves from the people of the world, and the quote "Character is what you in the dark." all the more true. It summarizes what everyone feels at one point or another in their life. In one book called The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick, the story of four girls and their mother's is told and how they too hide their "true selves" from the world and it truly supports the quote above.

Lena describes her mother as being very timid and apathetic to her circumstances, especially after she loses a baby. Although she is always technically around, Ying-Ying is a very absent mother to Lena. Lena realizes this upon observing the life of her neighbor, a girl about her age named Teresa, who comes from a loud Italian family. Lena believes that Teresa’s mother is going to kill her, as they are always yelling at each other. However, upon talking to Teresa, Lena finds out that they yell at each other so much because Teresa can be reckless, and her mother cares about her well being. Says Lena, “‘Won’t she be mad when she finds you?’ ‘Nah, she’ll just be glad I’m not dead or something’”(114). . In observance of this situation, Lena begins to wonder how Teresa thinks of her. She says: “Maybe she had listened through the walls and heard nothing, the stagnant silence of our unhappy house” (114). Lena is associating the loudness of her neighbor’s home with the love she expects from her own mother, and the silence of her house so strongly opposes that which she expects. This stark contrast of home lives showcases how different cultures approach motherhood, which really reinforces the idea of being American versus being Chinese that is explored so much in this novel. Lena desperately wants her mother to understand the expectations associated with motherhood in America, and doesn’t understand why her relationship with her mother is so much more broken than her peers’ relationships. Without these expectations from both Lena and Ying-Ying about how it is acceptable to mother, their relationship would have endured significantly less

In the short poem “Marks” my Linda Pastan, you are given an insight on the life of a wife who is also a mother of two. The setting of the story takes place in a standard family home, but instead of feeling like you were home it felt more like school. This poem is an extended metaphor; the author uses grades a student would normally get in school to compare to how her family measures to being a mother as well as a wife. Now through dialogue you can tell that she is not actually receiving grades for the required chores she has to do but it helps communicate the message to the audience. Due to the fact that it’s easy for just about any one reading this to relate to a grading system cause we all have received an amount of schooling before. The

Both Toni Morrison’s “Sweetness” and Edward P. Jones’ “The First Day” are short stories written by African American individuals. Other than this very basic similarity, these stories and their authors bear resemblance to each other. Both of the authors lived in a time before the internet, cell phones and probably more importantly the rise of an equal rights for all races movement. Given these facts and their shared African heritage, it is understandable both of the stories have at least an undertone of racial issues. On the more superficial level both “Sweetness” and “The First Day” feature a mother-daughter relationship. Even if this relationship is present in both stories, the qualities of this mother-daughter relationship and the tone of

In Rita Dove’s “Daystar”, there are several phrases and words that lead the reader of the poem to a profound understanding of the struggles that the main character of this poem experiences. According to the context of the poem, the main character appears to be a mother and wife in distress. Throughout the poem, she is presented as having a dreary, lethargic, and disconnected outlook of her current situation. The main question that must be asked is what the narrator tried to convey by stating that “she was nothing, pure nothing, in the middle of the day” (21-22). There are many possible answers strung across the poem that suggest why this mother describes her state of being in this way, such as the words that were being used to express how

“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. Throughout the entire novel, the mothers and daughters face inner struggles, family conflict, and societal collision. The divergence of cultures produces tension and miscommunication, which effectively causes the collision of American morals, beliefs, and priorities with Chinese culture which

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.