Kellie Keener
Dr. Craig White
LITR 4333
April 18, 2001

Same Shore, Oceans Apart

Amy Tan’s immensely popular novel, The Joy Luck Club explores the issues faced by first and second generation Chinese immigrants, particularly mothers and daughters. Although Tan’s book is a work of fiction, many of the struggles it describes are echoed in Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The pairs of mothers and daughters in both of these books find themselves separated along both cultural and generational lines. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs, and geographic loyalty. The gulf between these women is sadly acknowledged by Ying-ying St. Clair when she says of her daughter, Lena, "‘All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore’" (Tan 242). Ultimately, it falls to the daughters, the second, divided generation, to bridge the gap of understanding and reconnect with their old world mothers.

The Joy Luck Club begins with a fable that immediately highlights the importance of language in the immigrant story. It is the tale of a hopeful young woman traveling from China to America to begin a new life. She carries with her a swan, which she hopes to present to her American daughter someday. The language barrier is exposed when the woman’s good wishes for her future child are defined by the idea that this daughter of an immigrant will never know the hardships endured by her mother because she will be born in America and will "speak only perfect American English" (Tan 18). However, things do not turn out exactly as planned for the young woman. Her lovely swan is confiscated by customs officials, and her treasured daughter, now an adult, does indeed speak only English and cannot understand her mother at all. Without a common language, the expected loving link between mother and daughter is broken. Communication becomes impossible (Huntley 46).

This anecdote sets the stage for conflict between the Chinese mothers and their American daughters. The issue of the language barrier is a constant theme in both The Joy Luck Club and The Woman Warrior. In the immigrant narrative, English plays a major role in assimilating into the new world. For Tan, the struggle between Chinese and English haunts both her real life and her fiction. Tan herself stopped speaking Chinese at age five, though she has never lost her first language entirely (Amy). Her mother, Daisy, however, speaks "in a combination […] of English and Mandarin" (Huntley 3). Tan was taunted in grade school for her mother’s heavy Shanghai accent (Huntley 3). Because Daisy never became fluent in English, the linguistic friction merely escalated between the two women (Amy). Tan expresses this tension in her novel when the fictional Jing-mei admits that she has trouble understanding her mother’s meaning, and empathizes with her aunties who "see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English" (Tan 40-1). The stresses of a bilingual relationship are further explored when Lena St. Clair finds herself acting as translator between her Chinese mother and English-Irish father, who each refuse to learn the other’s language, placing their daughter in the cultural crossfire (Tan 106, 112).

Not all of Tan’s first generation characters eschew English, however. Lindo Jong actively seeks to learn the language of her new home and even meets her future husband in a night school English class (Chu 157; Tan 263). It is not surprising that, of all Tan’s second generation characters, Lindo’s daughter, Waverly, comes the closest to achieving the classic American dream.

Like Tan, Kingston, too, struggles with finding a shared language with her mother, Brave Orchid. Kingston’s mother tongue is Say Yup, a dialect of Cantonese, but, by the age of nine, Kingston had mastered English well enough to write poetry in her adopted language (Soderstrom). A true member of the divided generation, a very embarrassed Kingston finds herself translating as Brave Orchid tries to haggle in American department stores (82). Kingston talks of her mother shouting over telephones and in public libraries, repeatedly placing her daughter in the position of running interference between her mother and the more quiet Americans that surround them (11). Although Brave Orchid herself, never fully learns English, like Tan’s fictional immigrant with the swan, she truly desires that her daughter should speak it fluently, going so far as to snip Kingston’s tongue in infancy to ensure that she will be able to pronounce any word (164).

Ultimately, the language barrier is both treasured and despised by both generations. Tan observes that one reason she still speaks Mandarin is that it was the language preferred by her mother and aunties for relating juicy gossip (Amy). The ladies of the Joy Luck Club speak "in their special language, half in broken English, half in […] Chinese" at the Mah Jong table, knowing that their American daughters will not care to eavesdrop (Tan 33-4; Huntley 61). The Kingston’s, too, employ the language barrier to keep their secrets: Brave Orchid and her sister speak in Chinese, while their children complain about their parents in English (Kingston 123, 128, 141). Unfortunately, though, however useful separate languages may be, they cause a rift that is too painful for these women to maintain.

Just as deep as the split between languages is the one between traditional Chinese culture and the freer style of American life. In order to fully understand the depth of this cultural difference, one must examine the origins of the Chinese mothers’ ideas about family honor and human behavior. These first generation mothers have come to this country from one steeped in both Confucian and Taoist teachings. Confucianism dictates that women live under a strict family hierarchy, in which they are subservient to men and to elders. Taoism reinforces this aspect of Confucianism by stressing that human beings accept things in life as they come and without complaint (Tavernise). The problems between the mothers and daughters arise when these traditional Chinese values run directly counter to the American belief in freedom, equality, and individuality.

This division most acutely manifests itself in the daughters’ feelings of inadequacy at the hands of their mothers. The women of the second generation come to believe that they will never live up to the expectations of the women of the first, heroic generation. One difficulty lies in a lack of communication, which hearkens back to the aforementioned language barrier. The daughters simply cannot understand what their mothers require of them, and this incomprehension leads to adversarial relationships (Huntley 44). Tan says that she so disappointed her mother by dropping out her handpicked Baptist college that her mother refused to speak to her for six months. Ultimately, the two women became so enraged with one another that it made Tan physically ill (Amy). In The Joy Luck Club, all of the daughters feel what they perceive to be their mothers’ bitter disappointment. Jing-mei feels compelled to become some kind, any kind, of child prodigy in order to earn the approval of Suyuan. She fails at each attempt and wears the shame like a shroud, long after she rebels, declaring, "I didn’t have to do what my mother said anymore. I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China" (Tan 141-2). Waverly, though more successful, buckles under the same pressure (Tan 100). For Rose and Lena, the feeling of maternal disapproval stems from their romantic relationships. Kingston, too, feels inadequate in her mother’s eyes. She laments that "[m]y American life has been such a disappointment" (Kingston 45). Though she behaved well and made good grades in school, Brave Orchid still had no praise for her. While this treatment may seem harsh, it is not outside the traditional Chinese belief system, which reveres children as the hope for the future, while withholding overt displays of tenderness (Verschuur-Basse 108). It will take many years for the second generation daughters to come to terms with their mothers’ good intentions.

Finally, a third gap between these mothers and daughters is one of geographic loyalty. The first generation is forever bound to their homeland, China. Their children, however, know only the United States. The mothers feel a tremendous need to maintain their own connection with the old world and to create this same link for their daughters. For Tan, fact and fiction once again overlap, as both Daisy and the fictional mothers in Tan’s novel express their nostalgia for China. For, both, it is not enough to keep the memories alive for themselves and for their children. They feel a tremendous need to return to their homeland in an attempt to reconnect with the old places and to recover what was lost so long ago (Amy; Huntley 74). Both Daisy and the fictional Suyuan try desperately to locate the children they were forced to leave behind as they fled the violence of the war. Kingston’s mother instills in her children the belief that their stay in the United States is only temporary, which worries her fully Americanized daughter (46). Herein lies the trouble: While the mothers look on China with genuine fondness, their daughters remain apprehensive and are reluctant to trade the freedom that they enjoy in America, their homeland, for the more rigid traditions of their mothers’ place of birth. However, it is in these trips back to the old world that the immigrant narrative comes full circle, allowing the new generations to make the connection with the past. After all the anxious moments are behind them, the daughters are surprised to find that the trip back to the old world is actually rewarding, rather than tedious. Tan says that she could never have written her novel if she had not seen her mother’s homeland with her own eyes (Amy). Jing-mei finds the part of herself that she has buried, her Chinese self, when she visits Shanghai and locates her lost sisters (Tan 288). Kingston also expresses a desire to seek answers in the old world (205-6). On the journey home, mothers and daughters at last find some common ground.

Although it takes many years, these two generations of women learn to bridge the gaps of different languages, incompatible beliefs and customs, and even divergent national loyalty. By reconnecting on the home soil of China, they cross the ocean that has separated them and stand on the same shore for the first time.

Works Cited