Amy Tan and the Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan and the Joy Luck Club

Biography

The Joy Luck Club

Generation Gaps in the Joy Luck Club

Cultural Differences

Chinese-American Life

Amy Tan and the Joy Luck Club

On February 19, 1952, Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, to John Yuehhan, a minister and electrical engineer, and Daisy Tu Ching, a nurse and member of a Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan web site).

Tan's father fled to America to escape the Chinese Civil War and her mother escaped Shanghai prior to the Communist takeover in 1949. Daisy had to escape an abusive husband and lost custody of her first three daughters during her attempts to come to America.

In a recent interview, the best-selling novelist said that when she was growing up, she knew that, deep inside, she wanted to be an artist (Harper Collins). However, she was not encouraged to pursue this dream, and was convinced that she would not make money as an artist.

Her parents had planned her future for her, telling her that she would become a doctor and a master of the piano. Tan remembers her concern over these plans, saying that she was not a good pianist and did not know if she wanted to or could help those who were ill and diseased.

Tan wrote an essay called "What the Library Means to Me" when she was in the third grade, which won an essay contest (Rothstein). This was her first award. She would not write another award-winning piece until she was 33 years old.

Tan's father and brother died from brain tumors when she was very young. Her mother moved the family Switzerland, where Amy finished high school. During her teenage years and young adulthood, Tan was in constant conflict with her mother. When Tan left the Baptist college that her mother insisted she attend, she and her mother did not speak for six months.

Tan rebelled against her mother wishes, following her boyfriend, Louis DeMattei, to San Jose City College, and dropping the pre-med course her mother had urged her to study to pursue a degree in English and linguistics. Instead, Tan received her B.A. from San Jose State University in 1973 and her masters in 1974. In April of that year she married DeMattei, who was now a tax attorney.

Tan became a language consultant for disabled children in Oakland in 1976. She then took a position as MORE Project Director in San Francisco before taking a job with Emergency Medicine Reports as a reporter, managing editor and associate publisher in 1981.

After this, Tan became a freelance technical writer. She released her daily frustrations by writing fiction. Her friends teased her for being a workaholic, saying that she used writing as her own therapy for her stressful life.

Tan's first fiction story was "Endgame," which gained her admission to the Squaw Valley writer's workshop taught by novelist Oakley Hall (American Academy). The story appeared in FM literary magazine and was later reprinted in Seventeen. A literary agent saw Tan's second story "Waiting Between the Trees" and took her on as a client, prompting Tan to complete an entire volume of stories.

At this time, Tan's mother became ill. She made a vow to herself that if her mother got better, she would take her to China to find the daughters who had to leave nearly forty years before. When her mother got better, the two of them departed for China. The trip gave her a greater understanding about her mother and inspired her to complete "The Joy Luck Club."

Biography

The Joy Luck Club" is, in many ways, a biography of Tan's life (Harper Collins). Like the main character, Tan did not learn that she had half-sisters from her mother's previous marriage until she was older. She describes her pain from her father and brother's deaths in The Joy Luck Club through Suyuan Woo's loss of her twin daughters and her death. In addition, Tan expressed her feelings of guilt and anguish for not becoming a doctor in the book.

Like the main character of "The Joy Luck Club," Tan resented her mother when she was younger for being so controlling. According to her, her parents had great expectations for their little girl, including getting straight A's in kindergarten. In an interview, she tells a story that explains her situation (Harper Collins):

remember, I was in kindergarten and there was a little girl who I didn't think was a very good artist. I thought I did a very careful house, you know, with the chimney, and the windows, and the trees, and she was more of an abstract artist. Hers was very loose, and I didn't think it was very good but they decided to pin hers up in the Principal's office. So that was like getting the A. My mother wanted to know, Why wasn't my picture in that window? I was very wounded and frightened. I remember feeling that pressure from the time I was five years old."

However, she eventually realized that they simply were trying to what was best for her. Tan's mother suffered throughout her own childhood, having witnesses her mother's suicide. Therefore, Tan believes that her mother did not know how to be the nurturing mother she desired.

Tan describes a story from her childhood in her interview:

remember once one of my playmates from around the corner died, probably of leukemia. My mother took me to this funeral and took me up to see Rachel. And I saw Rachel's hands clasped over her chest, and her face was bloodless, and her hands were flat, and I was scared, because this was the little girl I used to play with. My mother leaned over to me and she said, "This is what happens when you don't listen to your mother."

The Joy Luck Club

In an interview, Tan talks about what inspired her to write "The Joy Luck Club" (Harper Collins):

wanted to write something in an effort to find meaning in my life - I think that's true of a lot of fiction writers - and then I specifically started to write these stories about a girl and her mother because I had almost lost my mother one time, or I thought I did. I thought she'd had a heart attack and that she'd died, and I didn't even know what I had lost because I didn't know her that well in one sense. She had been my mother yes, but I didn't really know about her life in the past and in that sense I really didn't know myself. So I sat down and I decided to write stories from the point-of-view of a girl or a young woman and then stories from the point-of-view of an older mother."

The Joy Luck Club is basically a look at the lives of Chinese women, who have immigrated into America, and the Chinese- American women who are born to them. The novel is a collection of stories narrated by the characters-- four mothers and their four daughters, who tell the tales of joys and conflicts in their lives.

Each story is rich with Chinese culture and heritage, speaking of traditional festivals, marriage ceremonies, food dishes, clothing, and rearing children. Tan talks about the social rules and expectations for the traditional Chinese woman in this book, showing that each of these women possesses a nature and spirit that gives her individuality, despite her upbringing.

The stories are individual tales that are later brought together through deaths, divorces, and family reunions. Many of the details each chapter refers back to events earlier in the book, and each chapter reveals more about the feelings that mothers and daughters have for each other, and the competition, love and resentment that takes place amongst each of the characters.

The first major wave of Chinese immigration to the United States took place in the 1940's (Chan). Because of the gold rush and westward expansion, Chinese men came to America looking for new opportunities. Later, in the 1860's, another large group of Chinese immigrants came to the United States to work on the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.

The Chinese built successful businesses across the country, including restaurants and laundry services. Many opportunities arose because of the absence of women in mining towns and along the construction sites. Many of the Chinese who lived in San Francisco, where tan grew up, were artists and factory workers.

Following the completion of the railroads, the mistreatment of Asian immigrants, particularly in California, increased. Because the Chinese were the first major group of Asians, they were the victims of prejudice more than other Asians. As a result, many immigration quotas were imposed, limiting the number of new immigrants into the United States.

The end of World War II, and the new communist government in China toward the end of the 1940's started another major flow of Chinese into the U.S., as well as a slight reversal of attitude among Euro-Americans. The mothers in The Joy Luck Club all arrived in America during this time period.

Generation Gaps in the Joy Luck Club

One of the major themes in Tan's " The Joy Luck Club" is a constant quest for identity. Tan's eight main characters all face the challenge of defining themselves while they are undergoing some sort of personal conflict.

Lindo Jong's early marriage into an unreceptive family caused her to become a stronger woman and made her vow to never forget her roots. Ying-ying St. Clair became a sort of "ghost" as the result of betrayal and loss in her life. Rose Hsu Jordan repeatedly tried to get her self-confidence back to standup to husband.

June Woo narrates much of the story, telling of her quest to China, which was orchestrated by her Joy Luck Club aunties. June tries to understand her mother's tragic past, while realizing her own personal and ethnic identity.

Either the mothers, who were born in China, or the daughters, who were born in the United States, narrate all the stories. While each of the characters is heavily influenced by the culture around them, there are large gaps in understanding the native cultures of the mothers and daughters.

One of the main conflicts between the mothers and their daughters is the desire of the young generation to become more Americanized. But as the latter generation grows up, they become more interested in finding their unique Chinese heritage.

When ending the book, Tan makes it clear that the Joy Luck Club will continue and that there is a renewed appreciation for what it means to be Chinese among the newer generation who must now pass their own experiences on to their own children.

The mothers seem to have a relatively firm grasp on understanding on the patterns of American behavior, due to the fact that they have been in America for along time.

However, their daughters have a hard time comprehending the Chinese culture, as they only have bits and pieces of information about China that they hear from their parents and from Chinese proverbs. Because of this, their daughters have little appreciation for the sacrifices their mothers have made to provide them with the lives they are living.

Cultural Differences

Tan points out how cultural differences can lead to a lack of understanding between Chinese mothers and their American daughters, which reflects her real-life experiences. In "The Joy Luck Club," June remembers talking to her mother, Suyuan, in English, who answered back in Chinese.

June believed that she and her mother "never really understood one another." "We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more" (Tan, p. 37). Tan shows, through her novel, how Chinese mothers desperately try to instill traditional Chinese values and beliefs in their children without explaining to them why it is so important.

In addition, the Chinese mothers carry the belief that the world is an ordered place. Personal misfortune and the effects of war have tested the mothers' traditional ideas. As a result of their survival, despite these challenges, they also believe that they can control their own destinies. After seeing America and all it has to offer, the older Chinese women try to teach their daughters, "you could be anything you wanted to be in America" (Tan, p. 132).

According to Tan, the same freedom of spirit that the Chinese mothers find so liberating is the same thing that made her, and the characters in the novel, so resistant to their mothers' constant advice and criticism. While Chinese mothers often teach their daughters that they are lucky to be a part of a culture where anything is possible and people are free to do whatever they wish, they also want them to accept their own traditional values and beliefs.

However, the American culture teaches the daughters to question everything, so accepting these things without question is a difficult thing for them to do. For example, in the story, June says that she usually dismissed her mother's advice and criticisms as "just more of her Chinese superstitions, beliefs that conveniently fit the circumstances" (Tan, p. 31).

To make matters worse, the generation conflict of Chinese mothers and Chinese-American daughters causes the daughters to have confusion about who they are and how they fit into society. They feel different from their schoolmates and friends, so they try to become more like everybody else.

In doing so, they dissociate themselves from the broken English and Chinese mannerisms that they see in their mothers. They also ridicule the traditional Chinese beliefs and reject their mothers' advice. As a result, they often feel a lack of spirituality, which affects their life decisions. They see so many choices offered in American culture and are unsure that they will be able to fulfill a variety of roles, which include dutiful Chinese daughter an successful American businesswoman.

June realizes that the aunties think that "joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds 'joy luck' is not a word, it does not exist" (Tan, p. 41). She then sees the differences in the two generations regarding fate, hope, luck and personal freedom.

She realizes that, unless the two generations can understand each other, the daughters "will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation" (p. 41).

Tan's story shows an incredible understanding of the generation conflict and uses this foundation to how difficult it is for immigrants to teach their native culture to their children. Tan points out that the mothers' traditional Chinese views and beliefs offer great possibilities in a world where their children may feel hopeless and confused.

Tan refers to astrology, which is a major part of Chinese culture, to shape her characters and conflicts. For example, according to Chinese astrology, Lindo Jong is a Horse, which her daughter says makes her "destined to be obstinate and frank to the point of tactlessness" (Tan, p. 167). The Horse sign also makes her poised, limber, eloquent, driven, powerful, and ruthless, according to Chinese astrology. Tan creates Lindo's character based on these qualities.

In fact, Lindo's first husband is selected by his birth year. The matchmaker says, "An earth horse for an earth sheep. This is the best marriage combination" (p. 50). When talking about her mother, Lindo's dughter Waverly says, "She and I make a bad combination, because I'm a Rabbit, born in 1951, supposedly sensitive, with tendencies toward being thin-skinned and skittery at the first sign of criticism" (p. 167).

Chinese-American Life

Tan frequently employs the theme of Chinese-American life, focusing on the relationships between mothers and daughters. In "The Joy Luck Club," the mothers are immigrants from China and the daughters are completely Americanized.