Joy Luck Club

3 Pages 758 Words

“One of the earliest and most profound bonds women form with each other is that of mother and daughter” (Alan). Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club,” which explores mother-daughter relationships, emphasizes the struggle for identity, balance, and understanding between Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters. The cultural differences impede the daughters’ realization of the importance of their mothers’ role in the journey of life. As readers, we are enlightened by the life lessons each daughter learns. These moving and powerful stories share the irony, pain, and sorrow of the imperfect ways in which mothers and daughters love each other (Chong). We are able to relate to the conflicts and struggles, and, thus, discovering how much our own mothers mean to us.
Each of the daughters in the novel struggle with gaining her mother’s acceptance as well as society’s. “Each mother has to transmit the rules of feminity to her daughter to help them survive in the world as she knows it” (Alan). The daughters reject this attempt and, thus, initiate a life-long conflict between the two. Coming from a rough childhood, the mothers want nothing less than perfection for their American daughters. They believe that anything is possible for a daughter if the mother wills it. June Woo explains, “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America” (141). However, this causes conflict as the daughter acquires the American way of life, she is both obeying and betraying her mother. “Even the most successful daughters are haunted by a sense of failure, and even the most determined mothers are dismayed to find their daughters repeating their own weaknesses” (Williard). June exhibits this “in the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations” (153).
This assertiveness for independence, in turn, delays the daughters un...