Mother-daughter relationships in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Adaptation of Identifying Relationships of Mothers and Daughters

Even with the fact that mothers and daughters in the contemporary society appear to have strong relationships, it would be difficult and almost impossible for someone to ignore the generational gap between the two groups. As much as both mothers and daughters prefer to believe that they are best friends, they often come across differences owed to the way they perceive particular ideas. It would obviously be wrong to generalize when considering this discussion, but it is nonetheless safe to say that mothers and daughters are divided by a series of concepts that are mainly related to the way the generation corresponding to each group perceives society.

While the generational gap can play an important factor in differentiating between how mothers and daughters think, there are a series of other elements that might interfere with the way that two different individuals see the world. Cultural values are also especially important when considering different types of thinking, with mothers who were born and raised in different cultural environments in comparison to their daughters finding it difficult to project their teachings onto their children. Similarly, daughters have trouble adapting to a lifestyle that their parents attempt to get them accustomed with, as their friends and the cultural values they come across while not at home are in sharp contrast to these.

Amy Tan's 1989 novel "The Joy Luck Club" provides an intriguing view in the mother-daughter relationship. The fact that her characters are divided between two worlds (the mothers are born in China and the daughters in the U.S.) contributes to the intriguing nature of the book. All across the novel narrators emphasize the difficulty associated with trying to translate seemingly simple ideas from one culture to another. The fact that both the mothers and the daughters are lost in translation when attempting to put across their points-of-view makes it difficult for them to truly understand each-other.

Jing-Mei Woo is a central character in Amy Tan's novel and she is Suyuan Woo's daughter. The girl finds it difficult to ignore the cultural differences between her and her mother and actually seems to have a complex understanding of both and her mother's frustration. "They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English." (Tan, 41) In a way mothers seem to be saddened as a consequence of observing how their daughters have no interest in their family's cultural background. To them this is also a reminder with regard to how the cultural values they are struggling to preserve are likely to be gone in the future with no one to keep them alive.

Mothers go through great efforts in order to have their daughters learn more about the world. Even in cases when these lessons might be flawed and limited from a social point-of-view, it is nonetheless interesting to observe how mothers use diverse means with the purpose to connect with their daughters better.

Wayne Wang's 1993 motion picture adaptation of Amy Tan's book provides the public with a more succinct and yet interesting version of the novel. The film further addresses the idea of storytelling as a means for two individuals to connect. The mothers in the film attempt to provide their daughters with a better understanding of society by presenting them with their background and with the problems they came across as they struggled to build a safe environment for their daughters. It seems that the characters in the film are particularly determined to have their daughters able to gain a complex understanding of Chinese culture in spite of the fact that it caused them to suffer in numerous occasions. It is likely that the mothers identify with this respective culture and, even with the fact that they did not live perfect lives while in China, they feel that it their daughters would be wiser if they took on attitudes characteristic to Chinese values instead of adopting apparently general American ideas.