Joy Luck Club Character Analysis - 1032 Words

In The Joy Luck Club, the daughters of the Chinese immigrant mothers consistently struggle with communication and understanding, partially because of the language barrier between them, and partially because of the different circumstances they have been raised in. In the article â€Å"Thoughts From the Daughter of a Chinese Mother,† the writer notes an increasingly different set of values from one generation of immigrants to the next, stating â€Å"...the next generation of kids grow up spoiled by Western notions of self-actualization, and throws away generations of hard work to become idealistic artists, and organizers, and reporters. In The Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei admits that she and her mother â€Å"never really understood each other.† Her mother has†¦show more content†¦In the article, the writer stated her mother’s strict rules: â€Å"No sleepovers, no television, only straight As, mandatory musical instruments- and a sick mixture of threats and taunts.† In The Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei told her mother that â€Å"...parents shouldn’t criticize children. They should encourage them instead...And when you criticize, it just means you’re expecting failure.† To which her mother replied with, â€Å"That’s the trouble. You never [live up to expectations]. Lazy to get up. Lazy to rise to expectations.† These mother daughter relationships struggle throughout the years because they don’t understand each other, and oftentimes they don’t try to. Sometimes pride and stubbornness can get in the way of trying to see things things in another one’s point of view, and that can be the downfall of many relationships. However, after her mother’s death, Jing-mei sees her mother in a better light and tries to understand her way of thinking, repairing a fractured relationship. Word Count: 515 Theme: Mother-Daughter Relationships In the article, â€Å"Immigrant Mothers and First Generation Daughters,† there is a discussion about the cultural chasm between first generation Latina daughters and their mothers. It reads that the society first generation daughters grow up in is extremely different than their mother’s homeland, and it can be hard to find a balance in values between them.In The Joy Luck Club, there areShow MoreRelatedJoy Luck Club Character Analysis1045 Words   |  5 PagesThe Joy Luck Club Theme Analysis The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is an entertaining book that focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families. They face problems in their hometown which causes them to move to the United States. They end up moving to San Francisco and face many different problems with their cultural background. The theme of The Joy Luck Club is the relationship between both the mothers and their daughters. A variety of different events occur throughout the book that explainsRead MoreCharacter Analysis : The Joy Luck Club1005 Words   |  5 Pagesyou who do not really understand what physical conflict is, it is a type of external conflict that occurs in a story when individual characters struggle against other external forces; a character may struggle against other characters, animals or even natural forces. In the fictional book The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, one of the Chinese women part of the Joy Luck Club known as Lindo-Jong suffers an ongoing physical conflict between her and her future husbands family the Huangs; from the age ofRead MoreThe Movie, The Joy Luck Club, By Amy Tan1563 Words   |  7 PagesIn the movie, the Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, we see many examples of the challenges of intercultural translations. The movie portrays cultural conflict between Chinese culture and the American culture as portrayed by the lives of four mothers and their daughters. The mothers were born and raised in China, adopting the high-content Chinese culture, while their daughters, born and raised in America, adopted the low-context American culture. This movie clearly brings out the cultural clashes andRead MoreAnalysis of Joy Luck Club Essay750 Words   |  3 PagesAnalysis of Joy Luck Club Ask any typical-looking Asian students around campus whether they are Chinese or Japanese and the reply will probably be universal: Neither, Im Chinese-American. In reality, developing a clear concept of exactly how they define themselves as a race has become a difficult thing to do in this day and age for most Chinese-Americans. Many have become so well adjusted to the American way of life, that the only thing still tying them to their ancestral roots isRead MoreAnalysis Of The Article Your Mother Is Your Bones About The Joy Luck Club 1125 Words   |  5 PagesCritical Responses to the Novel Orville Schell wrote the article â€Å"Your Mother is in Your Bones† about The Joy Luck Club. Schell starts out by giving some historical background information on China, about those emigrating in order to escape Communism and how Asian immigrants didn’t fit in America as easily as Europeans did. He also talks about Chinatowns and other struggles immigrants faced. He talks about the strange phenomena where Chinese-Americans were bound to China by heritage, but they hadRead MoreAnalysis Of Amy Tan s The Joy Luck Club, Homer s Odyssey1480 Words   |  6 Pagesalways disappoint us; for though we meet with something that. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Homer’s The Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles, and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, hope and expectation illustrate the thin line between success and utter destruction in which hope and expectation are found. Characters such as Junior, and Penelope have begun to maste r the art of hope, while characters such as June have people around her that lower her standards. Success is foundRead MoreThe Eight Heroes in The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan703 Words   |  3 PagesIn the novel The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, four Chinese mother-daughter pairs, each with her own unique story, have deep connections with each other. At the beginning of the novel they each seem like ordinary women, but as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that these women are more than just mothers, daughters, or wives; they can also be considered heroes according to Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell says a hero is someone who undergoes a departure, where the person is confronted with a problemRead MoreAnalysis Of Two Kinds By Amy Tan1567 Words   |  7 Pagesmother and daughter. Amy Tan is an author who writes about her life growing up as an Asian-American in Chinatown. Her novel The Joy Luck Club is a series of short stories about Chinese mothers and their assimilated daughters. On e of these stories is â€Å"Two Kinds,† which looks into the life of Jing-Mei Woo and her struggle to gain a sense of self. Some key themes in The Joy Luck Club are the generational and intercultural differences among Chinese-American families, the complex mother-daughter relationshipRead More Mother and Daughter Similarities in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club1955 Words   |  8 PagesMother and Daughter Similarities in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club â€Å"Here is how I came to love my mother.   How I saw her my own true nature.   What was beneath my skin.   Inside my bones.† (Tan 40)   Ã‚  Ã‚   The complexitities of any mother-daughter relationship go much deeper then just their physical features that resemble one another.   In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, the stories of eight Chinese women are told.   Together this group of women forms four sets of mother and daughter pairs. TheRead MoreReading report: Two Kinds by Amy Tan1347 Words   |  6 PagesReading report: Two Kinds by Amy Tan A summary of the passage Two kinds, one of the short stories in The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, first published in 1989, vividly displays a bittersweet relationship between Jing-mei, the narrator and protagonist, and her mother Mrs. Woo, and explores conflicts between a Chinese mother and her disobedient Americanized daughter. The story happened in the Chinatown in San Francisco throughout the 1950s and maybe the early 1960s. It begins with Jing-mei and her