The Joy Luck Club Identity Analysis

The novel of Amy Tan, ‘’The Joy Luck Club’’, portrays the struggle of four women and their daughters to find their own identity in American society. But what it means to be Chinese American? Was it easy for them to adapt to the new life? What difficulties the four mothers faced by their daughters? When Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States, it was evident from the beginning that this world was far different from their homeland. These immigrants were on a difficult path of struggling to become an American because they faced a dominant culture that really often, was acting and thinking in different ways to their previous lives. In this case, these mothers find themselves often caught between two worlds. The one is the old world of structured, didactic and traditional China and the other one, the new world of young, mobile

For example, their mothers make up an essential part of their identity because their mothers are in their bones. More than any of the characters, An-mei believes that your mother is "in your bones" because she strongly believes that relationship between mother-daughter is extremely corporeal. She also thinks that being Chinese is in your DNA and it is something that can’t get rid of it. And after that I began to see terrible things. ‘’I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me that I got from my mother. I saw devils dancing feverishly beneath a old I had dug in the sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children...And when I became older, I could see things that the Caucasian girls at school did not. Monkey bars that would split into two and send a swinging child hurtling through space.’’ In this quote, Lena sees part of her identity as handed down from her mother. It is obvious that part of this identity includes her "Chinese eyes," which see terrible things, an intense and dark imagination that comes from her mother’s