Mother-Daughter Relationship In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Barriers in a Mother-Daughter Relationship When immigrant mothers have children in a new country, cultural and communication barriers are created since the children are growing up in a different environment and culture.

In the novel The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, there are many mother-daughter relationships which have these barriers. The presence of cultural and communication barriers between the immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters result in detrimental effects on their relationships. Relationships between mother and daughter are severed by the dissociation of one’s culture. Jing-mei Woo denies having any internal chinese aspects other than her physical appearance which then angers her mother. Jing-mei’s mother

The mother wants to explain the importance of the feather to her daughter but she is unable to speak grammatically correct English and her daughter only speaks English. The woman’s daughter grows up speaking only English and “swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow” and “for a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, “This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.” And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English” (17). The mother is unable to communicate important messages to her daughter which then creates a language barrier. Jing-mei Woo is given a jade pendant from her mother and ponders what it means after but she is unable to find the answer since her mother has died. Jing-mei thinks about when her “mother gave [her, her] “life’s importance”, a jade pendant on a gold chain...But these days, [she] think about [her] life’s importance. [She] wonder[s] what it means, because [her] mother died three months ago, six days before [her] thirty-sixth birthday. And she’s the only person [she] could have asked, to tell [her] about my life’s importance, to help [her] understand [her] grief.”(197). Jing-mei did not communicate with her mother effectively while she was alive and she regrets it since she can only learn some things from her mother. This shows that when Jing-mei’s mother was alive, she did not share a strong relationship with her due to their communication barrier. Lena St. Clair, as a child, was unable to communicate with her mother and would lie about things to her. Lena’s “mother was from Wushi, near Shanghai. So she spoke Mandarin and a little bit of English. [Her] father, who spoke only a few canned Chinese expressions, insisted [her]