Mother-daughter relationships and inner strength in The Joy Luck Club

¶ … Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Tan's debut novel is arguably one of the most famous works of Asian-American writing. It is one of the few works with an explicitly Asian theme to find mainstream popularity. The novel remained on the New York Times best-seller list for nine months and was later adapted into a hit movie.

To date, no other Asian-American novel has matched the critical and popular success of The Joy Luck Club, not even by Tan's later works.

My interest in The Joy Luck Club stems from the 16 interlocking tales detailing the lives and struggles of four Chinese mothers and their four American daughters. The novel finds resonance with Chinese- and Asian-American families because of Tan's lyrical reconstructions of the immigrant experience, of poverty/fear/persecution in the homeland and of alienation in America. The parts of the novel set in China, in particular, give The Joy Luck Club the feel of a grand epic.

However, Tan's novel also resonates on a more personal level. By exploring the tensions between mothers and daughters, The Joy Luck Club sweeps the reader into a conflict that, despite ethnicity or "Orientalism," seems deeply familiar. After all, the complex relationships between mothers and daughters are both a multi-cultural constant and a staple of literature.

This paper focuses on the mother-daughter narratives in The Joy Luck Club. It focuses in particular on the mothers' side of the narratives. It shows how Tan successfully subverts stereotypes about Chinese and Asian women to reveal a fierce inner strength.

Biography

Amy Tan was born in 1952 in Oakland, California. Tan's parents were both immigrants from China. Her father was a Baptist minister while her mother came from an upper-class family in Shanghai (bio).

Tan's mother pushed her daughter to study medicine, hoping that Amy would eventually become a neurosurgeon. Instead, Tan studied English at San Jose State University in the early 1970s and did graduate work at the University of California-Berkeley (bio).

Tan began her writing career as a technical writer. She later turned to fiction writing, having gained inspiration from Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, a novel about a Native American family. The Joy Luck Club is Tan's first novel (bio).

Tan's novels contain elements of autobiography. For example, in her teens, Tan learned that her mother had two daughters in China from a previous marriage. In 1987, Tan traveled to China and met her two half-sisters for the first time. Describing the experience, Tan said that the experience finally allowed her to say "I'm both Chinese and American"...Suddenly some piece fit in the right place and something became whole." Tan later incorporated this experience into The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan bio).

Tan followed The Joy Luck Club with The Kitchen God's Wife in 1991. In the second novel, Tan focused once again on the mother-daughter narrative. Many critics found The Kitchen God's Wife superior in structure to the previous novel because the latter novel focused on a single mother-daughter narrative (Bio).

Tan's later novels include The Hundred Secret Senses in 1995 and, in the same year, The Year of No Flood (Bio). In addition, Tan also writes juvenile fiction. These works include 1994's The Chinese Siamese Cat and, in 1992, The Moon Lady (Bio).

The Moon Lady is a children's story based on a tale narrated in The Joy Luck Club. In The Moon Lady, Tan narrates the story of a young girl's experiences during the traditional Moon Festival in China (Henrickson).

Tan also ventured into film in 1993, when she co-authored the screenplay and worked as the producer on the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Like the novel, the movie enjoyed both critical and box office success (Bio).

In addition to her mainstream popularity, Tan has achieved critical praise for several of her novels. The Joy Luck Club was awarded a gold medal for fiction by the Commonwealth Club and was cited as the best book for young adults in 1989 by the American Library Association (Bio).

Tan has been lauded for her ear for dialogue, her lyrical writing style, her depictions of complex and ambiguous tensions in human relationships and a "sensitivity to the power of cultural and historical forces on the individual and family" (Bio).

Because of her writing, Tan has been hailed as an important figure in the emergent tradition of Chinese-American women's literature. Her two major works - The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife - are representative of her skillful portrayal of the emotional tensions between Chinese-American mothers and their American-born children (Bio). These tensions help ensure that her writing finds resonance with the growing number of Chinese- and Asian-American children who struggle with the same familial conflicts.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of Tan's writing, however, is on a personal level.

For Tan, writing is also a voyage of self-discovery. The novels, Tan writes, have allowed her to see "how Chinese I was. And how much had stayed with me that I tried to deny" (cited in Bio).

Personal Evaluation

Reading The Joy Luck Club is an enriching experience. Some critics point to its multiple viewpoints as a weakness. However, the various storylines allow the reader to experience and understand the roots of the conflicting emotions that spur each main character. Since the stories are united strongly by theme, the individual narratives combine to form a rich tapestry.

For me, the narratives of An-Mei and her daughter Rose Hsu Jordan are the most compelling parts of the novel. Tan provides a reversal of expectations, since the immigrant Chinese An-Mei is a much more assertive figure than her American-born daughter. An-Mei struggles to impart to her daughter the strength which she herself learned from her own mother.

Feeling that her mother would not understand, Rose turns to a psychiatrist. However, An-Mei understands because "she had almost become this way" (Tan 213). By the end of the narrative, Rose comes to terms with her husband's affair through the help of her mother. An-Mei's narrative has come full circle.

While some critics rightly point to the lack of strong male characters in the novel, The Joy Luck Club tells the story of women's lives. Through the lyrical language and imagery, Tan is able to present stories that are both sweeping and highly personal. The parts that detailed Suyuan's flight from China provide sweep the reader into a grand narrative of epic-like events. However, the most moving parts of the novel come when Tan delves into human relationships, as she charts the conflicts that divide and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.