The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan Analysis

Amy Tan is the Chinese-American woman writer who mainly highlights the issues faced by the Chinese immigrant community in United States, which is completely different society. Tan tries to bring out the conflicts that arise due to this landscape of geographical immigration of the Chinese family and these immigrants battle to establish their unique identity; search for their family relationships and bonding of one generation to another. Tan points out the issues that underlie the bonding between the traditional Chinese mother and the Americanized daughters. Also, she deliberately establishes the shape of women’s lives in patriarchal cultures. Tan’s novels, clearly tells about the bonding and relationships in the family. Tan, by using the traditional

With respect to this, Tan’s works relates to the cultural clashes, language problems and the effects that reflect in the family relationships. Tan’s writing style is presented in the novels through the narration of the character’s life stories or tales told by the character to another. In Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club, Tan details about the narration of eight women’s diverse life stories. The stories are narrated in the respective voices of the Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters. Tan gives more emphasis to the immigrant mother’s who faced lot of torments like war in China, immigration to America and finally the mother’s confess to their daughters revealing about their past with their broken communication. The Kitchen God’s Wife, Tan’s second novel deals about the mother-daughter relationship and dominating role of husband. In Tan’s third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, she elucidates the theme of bring out the reality and dream in the sisterhood

All of Tan’s novels have parallel narratives, one related to the past which is retold by mothers, and in one case a step sister who has come back from China; and the other is associated with the present stories of daughters about the cultural conflicts and alienation, they feel regarding the ancestral heritage of their home which has been transmitted to them by means of past memories. Hence, storytelling is the only possible means of communication for alienated mothers and daughters. Surprisingly, in the exchange of secrets, located at the end of the novels, characters obtain an impeccable insight about themselves and their Chinese identity. Sharing memories, in the form of oral histories, has been always considered a feminine act of breaking the silence and marginalization. The structure of the narratives demonstrates the individual tragedies of mother’s life in China, as well as, the obscurities of cultural transformation. The act of storytelling accentuates the mother’s strength in China where they were suggested to be invisible and voiceless human beings. They tell their stories to preserve their ancestral history, in addition to emphasizing their cultural differences. However, they find themselves muted in America, because their English is not good enough and they feel culturally