The Joy Luck Club Essay

Amy Tan is one of the most famous multicultural authors in the world to this day. The Joy Luck Club, one of her most popular books, is highly influenced by her life. This book is about four Chinese women and the loss of culture transferred from them to their daughters. The book takes place in San Francisco and partially in China where the main character goes to find her half sisters. Just like the daughters in the book, Amy Tan has lost a lot of Chinese culture from her parents, who were born in China, to her and her brothers. The relationship she had with her mother, her mother’s experiences, and her lost Chinese culture are all reasons to why Tan’s life is so connected to the book. Amy Tan and her mother, Daisy Li, have been known to have

A huge part of The Joy Luck Club is about the flashbacks and memories shared by the mothers from their days as young adults. The thrilling story of these four women and their struggles might as well be a biography about Amy Tan and her mother. Amy Tan’s mother, just like Suyuan Woo, also left her children in China and even though Daisy Li left three children and Suyuan Woo left two, there is still a connection between the two. The book is split up into four different parts with sixteen different stories all told by each one of the women, mothers and daughters. The parts in the mother’s point of views are most likely all of Daisy Li’s memories of her life that she had told Amy Tan. The parts in the daughters point of views are more recent memories Amy Tan has of her times as a young adult and lessons learned from her mother. A great deal of the book is based off of Daisy Li’s life. For example, An-mei Hsu, said “I know this, because I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness.” (Tan, Page 215) Tan’s mother taught her to be strong and independent that is really what that quote is all about. To be strong and independent you have to be able to take care of not only yourself, but the people you care for. That is exactly what Daisy Li wanted for Amy Tan, to be able to support herself and others mentally and emotionally for the rest of her