Finding And Losing Identity In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Finding and Losing Identity in The Joy Luck Club

“A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self,” according to the acclaimed author Salman Rushdie. To that end, a person’s identity is tied to the culture and the traditions from which they originate. For migrants, when they leave their homes and enter a new culture, they must uproot their identity and restructure it to fit the expectations of their new home. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the mothers of the novel must undergo one such upheaval when they immigrate to America, the effects of which reach through generational lines to damage both the mothers’ and their daughters’ identities. Tan develops the motif of

Symbolically, she did not fit into American conventions, like the beauty standards for “American women” represented by the dresses, or into American culture as a whole. To join American society, Suyuan had to give up parts of her Chinese identity, from her physical appearance, like her “brown-checked Chinese dress”, to her spiritual beliefs. Because of the pressure to fit in, Suyuan “could not refuse” this Americanization of her identity. Furthermore, Ying-ying loses her identity in America: Lena recalls that when her mother immigrated, her father proudly named her in her immigration papers: Betty St. Clair, crossing out her given name of Gu Ying-ying. And then he put down the wrong birthyear, 1916 instead of 1914. So, with the sweep of a pen, my mother lost her name and became a Dragon instead of a Tiger. (Tan

However, when she enters China, the Chinese heritage that she has always felt to be skin-deep suddenly morphs into an undeniable part of her identity. Her feeling that she has transformed, that her “blood” and “bones” are changing, shows that her mental self is reconstructing itself to include that new aspect of her identity. Overall, an understanding of cultural heritage is essential to the construction of a cultural identity. In Jing-mei’s case, she must connect to her roots in China to both begin and complete the process of identifying herself as