Amy Tan is one of the prominent Chinese American writers that have loomed since 1980s. Her first and enormously popular early work, The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989, brought her instant success. The novel illustrates the pitfalls of sentimentality in this dichotomy. Asia is portrayed as a tragic, ahistorical arena for the demonstration of women suffering, and America as the site of the Asian mothers’ redemption through their own modernization and their daughters’ assimilation. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club explores the conflicts between two generations and two different cultures. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a novel that touches upon the relationships and conflicts of Chinese mothers and their American raised daughters. As my essay will prove the split from one generation and the other relates to the process of Americanization that the daughters undergo, as well as the values and Chinese heritage that the mothers refuse to let go off. These factors will cause mutual suffering and in the end a generational gap between the two groups. The resulting generational gap animates the narrative, as mothers and daughters seek to appreciate each other, and their individual efforts diminish and contain the traumas depicted as precise of the maternal, Chinese culture. 1. Chinese Heritage and the American Dream The Joy Luck Club comprises a series of short-story-like vignettes that moves back and forth in time and space, between the lives of four Chinese women in pre-1949 China and