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Examples Of Trauma In The Joy Luck Club

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Dario Robison Mrs.Burns Pre-Ap ELA ll 06 January 2023 We, humans, have the amazing ability to retain experiences in our minds creating memories, and whether these memories are positive or negative, we learn from them. However, sometimes we have experiences that affect us in such a distressing way that they form trauma. These traumatic experiences can change how we look at things, including people, situations, and experiences. And even though it may have happened far in the past, it will stick with us for a long time into the future. We learn about how trauma affects people in the novel “The Joy Luck Club”. The writer of the novel Amy Tan tells us of the experiences of 4 Asian immigrants, as well as their 4 daughters, and how their experiences …show more content…

One of the parts of Ying-Ying’s trauma comes from the story “The Moon Lady” which contains elements of appearance v. reality, as well as loss of belief. This particular story tells us how Ying-Ying buried this trauma inside of her and reveals the reason why she finally remembers it that day all these years later as shown in the quote “Now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning.”-(Tan 83) The main focus of this story is The Moon Lady, the woman who lives on the moon and can grant people a single wish, as well as Ying-Ying’s belief in her. We can begin our analysis with the family that Ying-Ying lived in as a child, a fairly wealthy and of prominent status, yet extremely superstitious. Due to her family’s status, Ying-Ying was always told to be an …show more content…

Some of these events are a part of the story told by Ying-Ying’s daughter, Lena, in “The Voices In The Wall”. Ying-Ying’s superstitions have always had an effect on her life as we see in every story that she was a part of, however, in this particular story we see how her superstitions take control of her in a terrible way. When Ying-Ying was brought to the U.S. by her husband, Clifford, he changed her name to “Betty” and changed her birth year from 1916 to 1914 thus changing her Chinese zodiac sign from a tiger to a dragon as well. This caused her to lose herself in a sense, as she began to hide away and repress everything that had happened before her life in the U.S. Along with all of the sudden changes in her life, she began to lose herself mentally as well. When Ying-Ying became pregnant with Clifford’s child, she began to think that everything in her life was unbalanced thus causing her to move and rearrange everything in her home to create a more balanced energy flow and calm home. However, while doing this she bumped her stomach injuring her baby in the process. All of the injuries from bumping into the furniture caused her baby to be stillborn and once this happened, all of the trauma that she hid for all those years resurfaced causing her to say “How I had given no thought to killing my other son! How I had given no thought to having this

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