Mother-Daughter Conflict in Amy Tan's Fiction

Introduction: Amy Tan and the Mother-Daughter Theme

The Chinese-American writer Amy Tan, author of such popular and critically acclaimed novels as The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), and The Bonesetter's Daughter (1996), as well as two children's books and numerous short stories and essays (Huntley 19), often focuses in her work on conflict-ridden relationships between uneasily assimilated Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born, better-assimilated daughters. A dominant theme in Amy Tan's work is that of the Chinese mothers' hopes, wishes, and ambitions for their Americanized daughters; the daughters' frequent rejection of those same hopes and wishes in their quest for more individuated, Americanized identities; and the mothers' and daughters' alternately frustrated, alternately angry, alternately tender efforts to better understand one another and arrive at a limited peace.

In exploring this dominant theme within Tan's work, this essay focuses especially on three early works: her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989); the short story "Two Kinds" (1989); and her second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991).

Waverly Jong and Public Pride in The Joy Luck Club

Typically, the thoroughly Americanized daughters in Amy Tan's novels and stories seek, starting as children and adolescents, to distinguish themselves powerfully from their mothers and to discourage their mothers from "living through them." Waverly Jong, the child prodigy Chinese chess champion in The Joy Luck Club, spends so much time studying chess that she has only one household responsibility: to accompany her mother to the market for groceries each Saturday. As Tan writes, "My mother would proudly walk with me, visiting many shops, buying very little. 'This is my daughter Wave-ly Jong,' she said to whoever looked her way."

One day, fed up with her mother's public boasting, Waverly asks on the way home from shopping: "Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess?" (Tan 99).

Waverly's mother, misunderstanding her daughter's angry outburst, believes Waverly is saying she is ashamed of her Chinese mother and reluctant to be seen with her in public. But Waverly means simply that she would like her mother to stop bragging about her, because she herself finds it embarrassing. The misunderstanding brought about by this heated exchange clouds the mother-daughter relationship for years afterward. Neither one can or will forget it, even long after Waverly grows up and leaves home. To Waverly's Chinese mother, family solidarity and pride are her most important values. But to her American-born and thoroughly Americanized daughter, individuality and independence matter far more, and she resents what she sees as her mother's smothering attitude. In this early scene, Waverly is not in fact rejecting her mother, but is simply asserting her own separateness — a distinction her mother finds impossible to understand.

Jing-Mei's Rebellion in 'Two Kinds'

A similar theme occurs within the short story "Two Kinds" (Literature: The Human Experience 424–432). Excerpted from The Joy Luck Club, this story focuses solely on the main character Jing-Mei — also known by her Americanized name, "June" — as a child of about six or seven years old. In this story, Jing-Mei takes her first steps toward independence from what she sees as her Chinese mother's domination. Jing-Mei's mother insists, despite her daughter's clear lack of musical talent, that Jing-Mei persist in trying to become an accomplished pianist. Jing-Mei lacks sincere interest in piano playing, though she does enjoy wearing pretty dresses at recitals and curtseying gracefully to the audience at the end of a piece (428–9) — the trappings of performing in public rather than the art itself. In preparation for an upcoming recital, Jing-Mei carefully plans her wardrobe and perfects her curtsey, but neglects to practice her musical piece. She is in love with the idea of playing piano before others, yet she lacks the dedication needed to play well. As a result, she performs abysmally at the recital. Her family, especially her mother, is publicly humiliated by the disastrous performance. Right then and there, Jing-Mei promises herself that she will quit piano forever.

The following day, however, when Jing-Mei's usual practice time of 4:00 P.M. arrives, her mother treats her as if nothing at all has happened and insists, as usual, that Jing-Mei practice: "'Four o'clock,' she reminded me as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I wedged myself more tightly in front of the TV." (430)

Her feelings still raw from the day before, Jing-Mei refuses to budge from her spot near the television. Her mother then drags her, kicking and screaming, to the piano, where Jing-Mei shouts tearfully: "You want me to be someone that I'm not... I'll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!" The mother's answer and Jing-Mei's subsequent angry retort vividly illustrate much of the conflict within this story, and within Amy Tan's work in general: the question of whom and what the daughter "should" become, in the eyes of her Chinese mother, versus whom and what the Americanized daughter wishes to become for herself.

Also apparent within this same tearful scene at the piano are the cultural tensions and misunderstandings from which many similar mother-daughter conflicts in Amy Tan's work spring:

"Only two kinds of daughters," she shouted in Chinese. "Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!"

"Then I wish I weren't your daughter. I wish you weren't my mother," I shouted.

"As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, as if this awful side of me had surfaced, at last." ("Two Kinds")

The high-volume argument represents a turning point in the lives of both mother and daughter, though for different reasons. Jing-Mei's sudden outburst — in which she finally and forcefully begins to declare her separateness from her mother — marks the beginning of her defiant, troubled march toward authentic selfhood, an Americanized identity to which her mother can never completely relate. On the mother's part, her daughter's rebellion against future music lessons represents not so much a rejection of the Chinese part of herself as a rejection of the mother's vision of the American Dream as it applies to her children. For Jing-Mei's mother believes:

"you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get a good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. Of course you can be prodigy, too," my mother told me... (424)

And indeed, Jing-Mei at the outset enjoys entertaining the idea of being a child prodigy — say, a Chinese Shirley Temple — nearly as much as her mother does. But in truth Jing-Mei is not a prodigy, nor does the American-born child possess her mother's determination, so typical of immigrants, that success will eventually and inevitably follow if one simply insists upon it through continuing, tireless perseverance.

As Harold Bloom observes of this story: "'Two Kinds' has the irony, as a title, of meaning also two worlds, China and the United States. The daughter, understandably in flight from a love so possessive that it could destroy, is also obsessed by an unwarranted yet inevitable guilt. And yet she must rebel, since the musical genius that her mother demands is simply not there." (2)

Conclusion: Storytelling as the Path to Reconciliation

In each of the works analyzed here — The Joy Luck Club (1989), "Two Kinds" (1989), and The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) — mother-daughter conflict is readily evident within the respective outlooks, decision-making processes, and personal perspectives of the often embattled Chinese-American mothers and daughters. As the mothers tell their respective stories and reveal their true strengths, the daughters come, eventually, to realize that their mothers' seeming misunderstandings of them — and attempts to unduly influence and dominate their daughters' lives well into adulthood — may well be rooted in those same strengths. In discovering those strengths within their mothers for the first time, the Chinese-American daughters connect anew to previously unknown, ignored, or even rejected strengths within themselves.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. "Introduction." Modern Critical Views: Amy Tan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 1.

Chen, Victoria. "Chinese-American Women, Language, and Moving Subjectivity." Modern Critical Views: Amy Tan. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.

Huntley, E.D. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Tan, Amy. "Amy Tan on Writing" (from "Mother Tongue"). Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 4th Compact Ed. New York: Longman, 2005. 147–8.

---. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam's, 1989.

---. The Kitchen God's Wife. New York: Putnam's, 1993.

---. "Two Kinds." Literature: The Human Experience. Ed. Richard Abcarian and Marvin Klotz. Eighth Edition. New York: Bedford, 2002. 424–32.

"The Kitchen God's Wife: Amy Tan." SparkNotes from Barnes and Noble. Dec. 4, 2004.