Waverly Belong In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan author of A pair of Tickets was born in California during the 1950’s. Tan is the daughter of two Chinese immigrants who moved to America during the 1940’s. As an American Writer Tan’s works explore both mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese American cultural gaps. In A Pair of Tickets, the point of view is told through the stories protagonist who like Tan also faces numerus challenges in life. One is not a mature adult until one acknowledges and excepts their identity. June May visits China to fulfill her mother’s desire of finding her long abandoned twins thus identifying what it means to be born into two nationalities.

The concept is similar, with the mother pushing the daughter very hard to succeed, with the latter demonizing the former as a result. Lindo left her life as an arranged wife to a wealthy (albeit not the nicest) family on her move to America, and like Suyuan she only wanted the best for her child. However, Waverly’s talents were realized early in comparison to June, so rather than have a story of a mother pressuring her child to try new things we have one of a mother pushing her daughter towards what she excels at (in Waverly’s case, this would be chess.) Waverly took this very differently from the intended message, and saw Lindo living vicariously through her, showing off her daughter to passerby like a trophy that she had worked on. Lindo did not know anything about chess, so while Waverly saw this as an insult to her talents and more as bragging rights for her mother, in actuality Lindo was just very excited and proud of her

The loyalty and selflessness of the mothers ' devotion speaks to the force of the bond between parent and daughter. In "The Red Candle" Lindo complains"I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents’ promise. This means nothing to you, because to you promises mean nothing"(49). When she says "this means nothing to you" Lindo 's tone is clearly frustrated because she is making accusations. she compares her daughter 's loyalty to her against her own loyalty to her own parents, and concludes that Waverly is somehow an inferior daughter. Lindo 's speech shows the strengths, but also the limits, of the mother-daughter relationship. Daughters show incredible loyalty to their parents, and vice-versa, but sometimes, such loyalty can fade away, or be placed behind other priorities and it 's irrational for a parent to demand total loyalty of her daughter. Sacrifice and promises mean different things to the two generations of women. For the younger generation, there is rarely any consequence to not following through on a promise. Lindo worries that her granddaughter will continue the pattern of making worthless promises, rather than respecting the Chinese value

This story that Suyuan Woo tells her daughter shows how deeply the Japanese invasion of China affected the identity of many Chinese people. They were forced to flee their homes and their lives with only a few of their valuables, but eventually they had to give up those up too. Those few items were all that they had left to define themselves and remind them who they were so when they lost them they lost a significant part of who they were. Suyuan Woo lost more than just her past identity, she actually had to leave her twin babies on the side of the road in the hopes that someone could save them. This shaped her identity because throughout the remainder of her life she had to wonder if leaving them behind was the right choice and if they were

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 contemporary American writer born in Oakland, California on February 19, 1954. She was born to Chinese immigrants Daisy and John Tan. Her works explore mother-daughter relationships and Chinese-American experiences. Tan’s best-selling novels were The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Hundred Secret Senses, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement. Chinese American Literature began in the 19th century and flowered in the 20th century. The common themes followed are the challenges, interaction between generation, and identity.

In Amy Tan’s short story, “The Rules of The Game,” Lindo is a definite ally to Waverly, although she may have trouble expressing it. For instance, in the beginning of the story, Waverly goes to her first official chess tournament. As she leaps up from her cold metal seat after being called to play, Lindo gives her a good luck charm. The author writes, “My mother unwrapped something in her lap. It was her chang, a small tablet of red jade which held the sun’s fire. ‘Is luck,’ she whispered” (96). This shows that Lindo really cares for Waverly and wants only the best for her. A bit later in the story, we see that Lindo is really having trouble expressing this desire for Waverly. After some of Waverly’s matches, Lindo tells her to “win more [pieces],

“Rules of the Game” is a charming tale about a six-year old Chinese-American turned chess prodigy. At first the story seems a straight forward legend about an extraordinary little girl, but is actually centered more on the people surrounding Waverly whereas Waverly herself is a viewpoint character. Just as well, Waverly is the perfect character to give readers an intimate tour of Amy Tan’s crafted world. Waverly, as a child who regards Chinatown as her favorite play area and who regularly explores the back alleys of restaurants and curio shops, gives Tan literary mobility to probe San Francisco’s Chinatown both physically and culturally; her unrestricted liberty exempts Tan from logistic restrictions in creating a creative, yet realistic, story. Additionally, Waverly has the literary fortune of being a child of Chinese immigrants in a story detailing the lives of

Each one has difficulty in adapting to a specific culture, and especially if we are concentrating on the Chinese culture. For example, the author Elizabeth, in “The Struggle to Be an All- American Girl”, talked about her childhood’s experience of learning Chinese language. However, the author Kingston, in “Catfish in the Bathtub”, described the difficulties that she has faced in order to adapt with the Chinese food. Despite bearing some minor similarities between both articles, the difference between them relies on author’s purpose and tone, cultures background, obliging both authors, and refusing the obligations.

In the book “The Joy Luck Club” written by Amy Tan, there is a selected passage for this assignment it is called “Pair of Tickets”. This passage tells about a girl who has gone through hear-ache, pain, loss and suffering. Her name was Jing-mei. Jing-mei was a Chinese girl who grew up in America with traditional Chinese Parents, as a girl she did not want to be Chinese but as she got older we read that she yearned to find the part of her that is Chinese, she wanted to embrace her culture. In the passage her mother has passed away several months before, Jing-mei felt very lost after that. After the death of her mother Jing-mei receives a letter from two twin-sisters in China who were Jing-mei’s sisters that her mother had left in China to be in a better home during the war. Letter broke Jing-mei’s heart because they were hoping to get in contact with their mother, they did not know she had already died. Jing-mei sent a letter back saying that she was sorry and told her that their mother had died. Later Jing-mei and her father had setup a trip to meet her sisters in China. On way to meeting her sisters they

A thought provoking observation was expressed by Kirsten Dinnall Hoyte regarding Amy Tan’s Two Kinds, “Like many immigrants, the mother both wants her child to be American and fears her daughter's Americanization and the accompanying cultural changes" (165). But why would June's mother immigrate to the United States if she feared the influences of another culture? What historical circumstance could have sway June's mother to have left her homeland and everything in her life behind? After relentless research, I hypothesized that World War II propelled the story of Two Kinds because it provoked the Japanese to invade China and promoted the influx of Chinese immigrants to Chinatown around the 1950s. This in tune, would lead to the mother’s infatuation with making June a prodigy as well as the ongoing misunderstanding among June and her mother. Towards the end of the story, June still lacks the insight of the causes of her mother’s

First of all, culture can be defined as practices between people in cultural societies. Cultural encounter is also defined as the cultural identities and symbolic figurative and interpretational forms through an international and global perception. The concept of cultural encounters is explained and illustrated in the literature as the dynamic perception of culture. Cultural encounter concept is planned to deal with all the varieties of this cultural phenomenon including the communication between cultures in place and time, the interactions between people, the dialogue and conversations between them, the conflict between the people of one culture in another culture. This essay will analyses and demonstrate how the concept of cultural encounter

The mothers have a deeper connection with their culture because they were raised to be more traditional; they contain more wisdom that they have gained from their long lifetimes. It is inevitable for the pairs to have misunderstandings. One generation was born and raised in China, while the other, the daughters, were raised in America. The daughters strive to find their identities in American culture and not in Chinese culture the way their mothers did. In the book, Lindo Jong was forced to marry the boy chosen for her by the matchmaker. This meant she had to give up her happiness to fulfill the promise she made to her mother that she wouldn’t shame the family and she did everything in her power to keep that promise. Her daughter, Waverly Jong, did not have the same devotion to the meaning of the word “promise”. Amy Tan wrote, “A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, if she has a traffic jam, if she wants to watch her favorite movie on TV, she no longer has a promise (Tan 42).” The younger generation does not apply as much devotion to the smaller things in life as their moms did because they did not grow up in the culture that the older

The analysis above shows that many clashes are caused by differences between collectivistic culture and individualistic culture. There is another serious issue, the language barrier, that adds to the problematic relationship between the mothers and daughters. As Huntley aptly points out, the language barrier “separates the old world and the new, the immigrant and the American born” (60). Not being able to express themselves in the dominant language in the new country, the mothers have been, to some extent, left behind in the old world. They are like the mother in the fable “Feathers From a Thousand Li Away”, who wishes to give all of them to her children, but her limited English has made it so difficult that she can only “swallow the sorrow

like in life, characters have different feelings and this comes from all types of different cultures. Due to this, one’s feelings may change from time to time. An example of this exist in the short story, “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan. This piece of literature is about the main character Jing-mei, who is being over encouraged to be a prodigy by her mother. After completing this amazing narrative, the reader notices how the built up tension between Jing-mei and her mother affected their entire relationship. After a careful analysis of the story, the reader understands how Jing-mei’s feelings toward her mother changed, why her feelings changed, and how those changed feelings affected the entire story.