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

In her novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan focuses on the fact that the bond between a mother and daughter can overcome any ethnic barrier. Despite there being many disagreements and arguments about the ways to live their lives, Tan defies this issue by creating a bond that is unbreakable even though the experienced different upbringings. Certain disagreements keep the novel interesting and create a conflict depicting the problems stemming from this barrier. Through her use of similes, metaphors, and flashbacks, Tan shows how the bond between a mother and daughter can withstand even the strongest cultural differences. Tan expresses the changing connection between the main characters’ mother-daughter relationship through the use of metaphors. This is shown when Rose Hsu Jordan talks to her mother about her recent divorce with her husband, Ted. Tan illustrates this with the quote, “And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds spilling over the edges…” (Tan 220). The weeds spilling over the sides were killing the heimongmong plants, which was a metaphor for Rose’s confusion. This was representative of how her mother helped Rose to be more assertive about her divorce, and to finally realize what she wanted

Her use of flashbacks tells the different stories of each family, and eventually connects them all near the end. She uses metaphors to express the connection between both the girl and her mother. The similes Tan used are included to compare the differences between the mother and daughter she refers to. Tan has a theme of the importance of family in all her books, but The Joy Luck Club focuses on the most important relationship there is, the one shared between a girl and her mother, and it can overcome even the most different of