Motifs In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Do you yourself believe you could play the game of life by following the original rules or switching it up? As i read through the story, “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan, it informs me of so many different personalities and desires between these mothers and daughters. A certain set of mothers and daughters were Waverly and her mother Lindo Jong. Waverly and her mother have these personalities that might remind one of the abilities of chess board pieces because Lindo is like a pawn that knows her limits, Waverly acts as a Knight by being different from her mother but wanting to have the same result, and Lindo has the power of self control, knowing when to go and when not to go like the Queen, the most important piece in chess.

Throughout the novel, Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is a very cultured and well rounded book. I do think the parables and titles of each four sections foreshadow what will happen in the section. In the first section “Feathers from a Thousand Li Away”, the tale told is about a Chinese woman who migrated to America. However, before she came she bought a swan to bring with her to America.

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.

Amy Tan’s book, The Joy Luck Club, teaches the reader many lessons about family values and trust in one another. The most important lesson is that of the relationship between mothers and daughters. Tan makes important statements about the need daughters have to live up to their mother’s expectations, and their want for love from them. Not only that, she also tries to teach the reader that the connection between a mother and daughter is incredibly strong. An-Mei says to June, “Not know your own mother?

Shame is a very powerful and social emotion that has been also classified as a form of physical pain. According to Alan Fogel, Ph.D., “When people feel emotional pain, the same areas of the brain get activated as when people feel physical pain…” Additionally, it requires an audience: someone cannot actually experience shame without having people around them. Shame is an evident theme that occurs frequently in the novels: The Joy Luck Club and Flight.

In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, mother and daughter relationships are put to the test. Four women meet to play a game of Chinese mahjong, keeping a tradition alive. Suyuan Woo, founder of the club, had a daughter named Jing Mei June Woo. Suyuan had two daughters which she expected both to succeed to her standards.

A Confucian philosopher once said, “No matter where you travel, you always carry a bit of home within yourself.” In the same sense, everyone is inextricably tied to their culture; it is a facet of their character that they cannot escape. One’s cultural roots shape almost every aspect of their life, especially the manner in which they experience the world surrounding them. Specifically, in the novel The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, the arranged marriages and familial traditions of Lindo Jong’s story are different from those of Rajiv Kumar in the article “Matrimony with a Proper Stranger” by Miguel Helft. Also, the families in The Joy Luck Club and the essay “Thanksgiving:

An exhausted, young woman walks the side of the road, heaving a baby in each arm with two loaded bags containing her only food. She reaches her limit, places the girls under a tree, and walks away with the two bags of rice, unaware that she would reunite with her abandoned daughters almost 40 years later. A powerful story, such as this, is one of the many contained within The Joy Luck Club. Amy Tan writes this particular chapter based on a similar event involving her mothers' escape from Communism and the desertion of her two daughters. Upon doing so, she also introduces eight other stories.

The connection between a mother and her daughter is special. A bond is created from birth that is unbreakable. Because this bond is so important, it is approached in many different ways. In the excerpt from Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, she talks about her daughter growing up playing the violin. In the excerpt from Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club, she talks about herself as a young woman growing up with a very strict mother figure who wanted her to play the piano.

Barry seems to have an internal conflict about the future and how it will play out for his daughter and him, and is fearful about if it that means they won’t be as close anymore. “He was acutely aware of how tenuous her life was, of how much he would suffer if he lost her. For a long time afterward, he thought of her as being intricately constructed of fragile paper.” (3). For a father, Barry is fairly protective of her daughter ever since she was younger, and it seems that seeing her grow up makes it difficult for him to let go of her and let her grow up