Gender Roles In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club, a 1989 novel written by Amy Tan, touches on the stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers who left behind their heavy pasts in China, and brought along their hopes of finding a better future for themselves and their American-born daughters to San Francisco. One of the most prominent themes that showed up in the book was how drastically different the mothers’ upbringings in China were to their children’s upbringings in America. Consequently, this resulted in factors—with the language barrier and differences in ideals leading to misunderstanding and miscommunication—that dramatically affected the relationships between the mothers and their daughters. Through my mother's and I's different upbringings, which led to language limitations

While she already knew the basics of English when she grew up in Vietnam, it was not enough now that she was a resident of a country that mainly spoke in English. Therefore, upon immigrating into the United States, she had to partake in an ESL program—also known as “English as a Second Language”—which was a program offered to non-native English speakers to improve their language skills. In addition, while working her part-time job as a cashier, she was able to learn more English through conversing with shoppers. Finally, after learning the language and residing in the States for several years, my mother successfully became an American citizen after going through a naturalization interview and took several tests, all of which were conducted in

The language barrier is one of the most common problems for Vietnamese-American families, although it is certainly not limited to just those type of families, with the older generation speaking Vietnamese while the younger generation spoke English. I was raised in an all-Vietnamese household, so it was only natural that my first language was Vietnamese. When I turned five years old and began attending an American elementary school for the first time, I had very little to no experience with speaking, writing, and reading English; for the first few years of my life, I struggled to learn even the simplest of the basics, often confusing my grade school teachers with a strange hybrid Vietnamese-English statements. As I grew up, I became more and more familiar with the American culture—my English skills improved immensely and I was able to hold full conversations with my Caucasian friends. But eventually, it also started to outweigh my ability to speak Vietnamese. Since I was constantly surrounded by English speakers, I felt like I was beginning to lose my Vietnamese heritage little by little each day, even now. I was not as fluent in Vietnamese as my cousins, who grew up in Vietnam for the most part of their childhood before moving to America and yet they were relatively excellent with