Mothers, Daughters, and Identity in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club

Introduction: Identity, Memory, and Reconciliation

By understanding her mother, a daughter better understands her own soul. By understanding her mother's Chinese identity, a daughter better understands her Chinese-American sense of self. By understanding the past, one can move into the future. This last truth applies not only to the prodigal daughter Jing-mei (also known as June) Woo in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, but also to her mother. Until Suyuan Woo reconciles with the children she believed were lost in China, she cannot be at peace with her past or with her Chinese-American daughter. Only by coming to terms with the twins she abandoned as a young woman does she attain a sense of forgiveness for her unavoidable actions. Only by meeting these Chinese twins in China does her American daughter June gain her full sense of identity as someone who could "also see what part of me is Chinese" (Tan 331).

The book suggests that modern identities are multiple and multi-faceted, but must always be reconciled for a woman to achieve a full sense of psychological healing — whether she is a mother, a daughter, a granddaughter, or all three.

The novel's emphasis on the need for mothers and daughters to reconcile present with past — in order to move forward and forge an identity that is both Chinese and American — has, as Tan has stated, secure roots in her own personal history. In a 1995 interview during the book tour for her follow-up to The Joy Luck Club, she remarked that "stories from my mother came more naturally" than those from her father. She recalled listening as her mother and aunts "sat at a table covered with newspapers, shelling fava beans or chopping vegetables and gossiping about the family, and going on for hours and hours about some little detail that they found disgusting in some relative or friend" (Giles).

Amy Tan's Autobiographical Roots

Although Tan related such anecdotes "with a laugh," she also admitted to the difficulties of reconciling past and present in her own life, describing her history as one of "Conflicts. Tragedies in life, difficulties. A mother who was depressed…being the only Chinese girl in a school. Moving every year. Graduating from a private school in Switzerland among rich people and not being rich…you know, those are the things that make you either psychotic or a fiction writer" (Giles).

One way Tan came to terms with this was by embracing multiple perspectives and dual identities, Chinese and American. As she explained: "I think that the other reason that I've become a storyteller is that I was raised with so many different conflicting ideas that it posed many questions for me in life, and those questions became a filter for looking at all my experiences and seeing them from different angles. That's what I think a storyteller does, and underneath the surface of the story is a question or a perspective or a nagging little emotion, and then it grows" (Giles). The multi-layered narrative structure of The Joy Luck Club, generated by this upbringing, is striking in the way it alternates between past and present and among the different perspectives of the club's members and their daughters.

There is no omniscient narrator in the novel's framework — unless one counts the nameless woman of Chapter 1. Afterward, all perspectives are rendered in the first person. This appears deliberate on Tan's part, for it reveals how little the daughters often understand of their mothers' past lives in China. The alternating perspectives frequently clash, or remain poorly informed of one another's historical and emotional truths.

Narrative Structure and the Limits of Language

Because the older women do not all speak English as fluently as their daughters, or with the same emotional command of the language, understanding between the two generations becomes even more difficult. The barriers are not simply those of geography and generational conflict, but of language itself. At the end, June must physically return to China in order to become Chinese — she cannot achieve that connection through language alone, because her mother's perspective and her own are torn apart by the limitations of first-person narration and the conflicts of language.

The Chinese-American milieu of a San Francisco neighborhood furnishes the main cast of characters in The Joy Luck Club, but all the women carry varied and largely unknown pasts in China — as child abandoners, mothers, survivors of tragedy, or divorced and cast-off wives. All are different. "What the four families in that book, the Woos, Jongs, Hsus, and St. Clairs, have in common is mother-daughter relations. The mothers are all first-generation immigrants from mainland China, speaking very little English and remaining cultural aliens in their new world. The daughters are all born and educated in America, some even married to foreigners" — that is, to native-born American men (Xu 1).

Conclusion: Unity Across the Divide

Ironically, the interlocking stories of the Joy Luck Club cohere in ways the mothers and daughters themselves do not. "Mothers who bemoan the distance to their daughters but who had good intentions. The reader is poignantly aware of the potential for greater communication and understanding, but only in the reader's mind is the dialogicity between positions uncovered and experienced" (Souris 6). This potential is never perfectly realized within the outward narrative of the book, yet some internal healing and unity between mother and daughter is clearly achieved at the very end. Although they cannot verbally unite, June sees that she and the twins together "look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish" (Tan 331–332).