Character Change In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

To show character change in The Joy Luck Club Tan uses values to stress the importance of winning and losing. The club is a night for the Aunties to come together, to play mah jong, for a night of happiness and pleasure. Although played as a gateway from negativities, there was a reoccurring obstruction causing discontent. Winning or losing in the game built the idea of survival whether it be a game or a real life situation. The Aunties believed in this “...view of the loser as a victim who fails to survive, and belief that one should make every effort to defend oneself against the bruising experience of being a loser” (Xu 10). The same people would win and lose because no luck is a match compared to skill. As a solution, the Aunties came to an agreement “‘Now we can all win and lose equally. We can have stock market luck. And we can play mah jong

For all Jing-mei’s life, she has never understood her own mother. The Aunties were in shock to hear Jing-mei so unaware of her mother as a person along with her wish. Suyuan’s wish was one step closer to finally meeting up with her two daughters she abandoned. Jing-mei replies how she does not know what to tell her two sisters about their mother. The Aunties are uneasy by Jing-mei's statement “‘Not know your own mother?’ cries Auntie An-mei with disbelief. ‘How can you say? Your mother is in your bones!’” (Tan 16). Jing-mei little by little understands her mother's ways after her passing. Jing-mei and her father travel to her mother’s homeland to comprehend what her mother endured “She must not only hear her mother's words, and later, her father's, but also she must see the landscape that those words, or mini poems, interpret in order for her to discover her own individual place” (Wood 13). Once Jing-mei was with her sisters, her character grew or the better. In the end, Jing-mei finally understood and knew how Suyuan was in her