Daughters In The Joy Luck Club

Culture is the one thing in this world that is truly diverse. All walks of life, all around the world, live differently in their own unique way based off of their beliefs. Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club, experienced this separation in her own life with her mother who was a Chinese immigrant. Amy being raised in America was influenced by a different culture than her mother, which at times put a wedge between their relationship. Along with that Amy was born in a dynamically different generation than her mother. Amy Tan took her real life experiences and molded them into a novel with many different, but connecting short stories about the relationship between Chinese immigrant mothers and more Americanized daughters. In this essay, I

The mothers have a deeper connection with their culture because they were raised to be more traditional; they contain more wisdom that they have gained from their long lifetimes. It is inevitable for the pairs to have misunderstandings. One generation was born and raised in China, while the other, the daughters, were raised in America. The daughters strive to find their identities in American culture and not in Chinese culture the way their mothers did. In the book, Lindo Jong was forced to marry the boy chosen for her by the matchmaker. This meant she had to give up her happiness to fulfill the promise she made to her mother that she wouldn’t shame the family and she did everything in her power to keep that promise. Her daughter, Waverly Jong, did not have the same devotion to the meaning of the word “promise”. Amy Tan wrote, “A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, if she has a traffic jam, if she wants to watch her favorite movie on TV, she no longer has a promise (Tan 42).” The younger generation does not apply as much devotion to the smaller things in life as their moms did because they did not grow up in the culture that the older