Musical identity and mother-daughter reconciliation in The Joy Luck Club

¶ … Joy Luck Club

Pleading Child." "Perfectly Contented" (155).When Jing Mei Woo realizes that tehse two titles of two apparently separate songs are part of the same musical piece she begins to understand, by uniting these two words and completing the song, that she has become closer to her mother, even after her mother's death. For most of her life, Jing Mei battles with her mother. She does not understand her mother's background and suffering fully. Nor does her mother understand the struggles of a young American woman coming to terms with her identity. Finally, the two women reach a kind of peace, that is solidified when Jing returns to China and meets with the two twins that her mother was forced to abandon when she lost everything in China.

The hated piano is purchased for the young girl, because, Jing thinks, that her mother is merely competing with Auntie Lindo, whose daughter Waverly, a chess prodigy, is a threat to her mother's ability to brag to the other Chinese mothers. While this is true to some extent, with the knowledge of an adult, Jing understands: "America was where all my mother's hopes law. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, win baby girls" (141) America was a place of infinite opportunity for her children, thus she would drive her daughter to compete. She cannot see that there is no way that Jing can compete with the stuck-up Waverly, and by forcing her daughter to do so, she is only making her unhappy. Jing becomes filled with a sense that if she is not a prodigy at something, she is worthless.