Mothers And Daughters In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

As Wynonna Judd once said, “The mother-daughter relationship is the most complex.” Amy Tan explored this relationship between mother and daughter in her novel, The Joy Luck Club, a story about four Chinese women and their daughters. After her death, Suyuan Woo left her daughter, Jing-mei, to fill the fourth corner of the Joy Luck Club, a club Suyuan made with three other couples who also left unspeakable tragedies behind in China. At the end of her first meeting, Jei-mei unexpectedly found that her two sisters who her mother had left in China years ago were alive and well. Composed of short stories, this book follows the lives of the four Chinese mothers and daughters through their hardships in their past and present. The story eventually completes

Jing-mei Woo’s mother, Suyuan Woo, evaluated her friends and family based the five elements which she believed all people were made of. Jing-mei reflected on her mother's criticisms, “Too much fire and you had a bad temper… Too little wood and you bend too quickly to listen to other people’s ideas, unable to stand on your own… Too much water and you flowed in too many directions…” (Tan 31). Suyuan Woo used this system to evaluate everyone: either you had too much, too little, or just enough of each one of the five elements. The Chinese believed the five elements made up everything and everyone. Suyuan, being taught this as a child, was told that it was what was inside of them that really formed a person. When Waverly Jong brought Rich, to meet her mother, Lindo Jong kept commenting on the spots on his face. Waverly quickly rushed to her fiance’s defence, saying, “‘They’re freckles. Freckles are good luck, you know’” (Tan 177). After this comment from Waverly, it was as if Lindo Jong had realized her place, not commenting on his appearance again. Even though he had freckles, which some may view as a blemish, the luck the “blemishes” portrayed was something Lindo could not argue against, as they also represented her beliefs. Later on, the symbols of

When Suyuan Woo was creating the first Joy Luck Club, the invitees included “…an army officer’s wife like myself. Another was a girl with very fine manners from a rich family in Shanghai… And there was a girl from Nanking with the blackest hair I have ever seen. She came from a low class family…” (Tan 23). In the time of war, these four ladies from different social standings and birthplaces came together to meet every week for each other's company. They put aside their differences and bonded together in the middle of a war, in the face of death. Death was also a force that humans were all equal compared to, as shown when An-mei Hsu was on the brink of death and her Popo reminded her, “‘You're dying clothes are very plain. They are not fancy, because you are still a child’” (Tan 47). One would expect An-mei Hsu, who came from a well-off family, to have a fancy, costly funeral, but since she was a young child, she was fated to have the same funeral as a peasant her age would receive. This develops the sense of equality because she would have the same dying clothes as a child her age without the same status, showing ranking does not matter in death. The equality of man was further proven when Ying-Ying St. Clair was young and complaining about the certain ways she had to behave. Her Ahma replied to her complains with a simple answer, abruptly stopping