Culture In The Joy Luck Club

A Confucian philosopher once said, “No matter where you travel, you always carry a bit of home within yourself.” In the same sense, everyone is inextricably tied to their culture; it is a facet of their character that they cannot escape. One’s cultural roots shape almost every aspect of their life, especially the manner in which they experience the world surrounding them. Specifically, in the novel The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, the arranged marriages and familial traditions of Lindo Jong’s story are different from those of Rajiv Kumar in the article “Matrimony with a Proper Stranger” by Miguel Helft. Also, the families in The Joy Luck Club and the essay “Thanksgiving: A Personal History,” by Jennifer New, affected how their children viewed

Cultural experiences shape the way people see and understand the world around them, and the two cultural experiences which most powerfully shape people’s perspectives on life are family and societal norms. Family is a powerful influence; one’s upbringing can shape their worldviews for years to come. Since no two families are exactly alike, no perspectives can be precisely identical. One significant role that family plays is its shaping of marital traditions. In The Joy Luck Club, Lindo Jong’s rural Chinese family depends on a matchmaker to find “the best marriage combination” for their daughter (Tan 50). Lindo herself acknowledges the decision and recognizes that she has “no choice” in the matter for the majority of her childhood (Tan 51). In “Matrimony with a Proper Stranger,” Rajiv asked his parents to arrange his marriage. They were the ones that took it upon themselves to “seek out suitable partners” for their son (Helft 84). For families in the Chinese countryside, the wisdom of matchmakers and the compatibility of zodiacs had a heavy influence on the perceived outlook of one’s marriage. Because of this, Lindo’s family trusted the

The cultural norms of a person's background often have a large influence on their life. For example, in "An Indian Father's Plea", Robert Lake describes to his son's teacher why his son "may be slow in grasping the methods and tools [the teacher is] now using in [her] classroom", because his cultural norms have told him to learn through methods such as to "watch and study the changes in nature", unlike the methods used by his western peers (Lake 111). In Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club", Lena St. Clair adopted her mother's "Chinese" ways of thinking, seeing things such as "monkey rings that would split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space", things "that the Caucasian girls at school did not" sense (Tan 103). Both Lake's son and Lena St. Clair have been influenced in the way they think and perceive the world by their cultural norms. Wind-Wolf, Lake's son, was taught by his cultural norms to learn through observation of the world around him, which made himself seem "slow" in comparison to his peers, who were raised learning with the same methods as used in the classroom. Lena St. Clair was influenced by cultural norms set by her Chinese heritage to see many things as threats, things that are not seen the same way by the American-raised girls around her. In addition to the expectations of one's heritage, the norms of one's environment