Power In The Joy Luck Club

Power can be expressed in many ways and forms.The novel Joy Luck Club and its movie counterpart, share in the struggle of power between Chinese ideals and American ideals and how their balance creates and eventually fixes barriers between Ying Ying St. Claire and her daughter Lena St. Clair, and Lindo Jong and her daughter Waverly Jong.

Since the first look into the relationship between Lena St. Clair and her mother Ying Ying, their relationship clearly has a crack in it. Both Lena and Ying Ying view each other as broken at some point during the novel and this brokenness creates a rift in how they understand one another. The stories from Lena’s point of view are missing information about her mother. Lena struggles her whole life trying to cure her mother without ever knowing why. This

As she starts to resent her mother, the negativity starts to affect her choices and her life-“After that I began to see terrible things. I saw these things with my chinese eyes, the part of me I got from my mother”(103). Ying Ying’s life in china is what keeps her apart from her daughter, and what aids her daughter into resenting her. After Ying Ying slowly succumbs to fatalism her daughter starts to fall onto the same path. The secrets between the two is what breeds the disconnection between them and only after they release the barrier guarding their secrets do they begin to understand each other. Ying Ying understands that her daughter does not understand how horrible her life was back in china-“All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me”(67). Their relationship shows how Ying Ying’s chinese background causes a rift in their communication and the successfulness.”She and I have shared the same body. There is a part of her mind that is part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore.