Hue Martell
LITR 4333: American Immigrant literature
Dr. White
Research Paper

Mothers' and Daughters’ Conflicts in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

We live in a mobile and global world with the development of the technology. Still America continues to be the symbol of the land of freedom and of opportunity. Arriving to America, the Chinese immigrants who come from a traditional, structured, old world struggle to find a balance in a modern and dynamic new world. In order to realize the American dream, the first generation of immigrants have to learn the language, acquire education, and assimilate into the dominant culture. They courageously leave the past behind except what they carry in their memory. Thus, immigrants often experience shock and resistance in dealing with the new world culture. This is especially true for the second generation Chinese-Americans who resist and are ashamed of their heritage. Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club dramatizes this conflict which arises between the first and the second generations through sixteen stories of four mothers and four American-born daughters. Tan succeeds in showing the strength of the mother-daughter bond from China to America despite the cultural and linguistic differences between Chinese mothers and Chinese-Americans daughther through the immigrant narrative.

The Chinese culture is based on Confucius, whose teachings are more practical and ethical than religious. Confucius’ virtues include righteousness, propriety, integrity, and filial piety toward parents, living and dead. His teachings also emphasize obedience to the father figure, to the husband, and to the eldest son after the passing of the husband. Thus, the role of women is one of subordination to men. In a family the male figure maintains an absolute power over his familial matters. Whereas in America, gender does not have the same bearing on the cultural tradition. The values of a person is very much based on its own merit not what the tradition dictates how one should live its life.

Both Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston recognize the difficulties faced by women in such a regimented society. Kingston in The Woman Warrior tells of the folk sayings that proclaimed the worthlessness of women, such as "[t]here’s not profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls," or "[w]hen fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls" (195,6). According to Anne P. Standley, "Kingston tells of her lifelong struggle to fashion an identity on her own terms and to draw sustenance from her Chinese culture while rejecting its sexist values" (165).

For her part, Tan in Joy Luck Club illustrates the cultural differences between these two conflicting generations by alternating the voices of the mothers with those of the daughters. Four mothers with a painful past in pre-1949 describe their struggles in China against traditional female roles and family domination. By coming to America they are bringing their hope for a better life which they try to instill into their children. At the start of the book, Jing-Mei sits in the seat for her deceased mother who had started the mah-jong club in 1949 in San Francisco. The Joy Luck aunties inform Jing-Mei that she has two half-sisters in China. She has to go to China to instill in the sisters the spirit of their mother. Jing-Mei cries out, "What can I tell about my mother? I don’t know anything" (31). Jing-Mei is ashamed of her cultural background. She thinks of Joy Luck Club as a "shameful Chinese custom, like the secret gathering of the Ku Klux Klan" (16). She realizes that she does not know her mother. As the Joy Luck aunties speak of her mother’s attributes, Jing-Mei has another realization:

They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as

unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see

daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they

are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. . . .They see daughters who

will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation

to generation." (31)

Jing-Mei realizes that other daughters are also frustrated by the expectations from their mothers. Her own mother demands her to be a piano prodige. Jing-Mei knows she is being pushed because her mother competes with Lindo Jong, her best girl-friend whose daughter, Waverly, is a national chess player.

Jami Edwards states, "The Joy Luck Club deals with that connecting hope and how these four daughters and these four mothers struggle to find ways to pass that connection across the fragility of time from China to America." The mothers are afraid that the hope that they carry with them will be lost if the bond with the cultural heritage is broken. All the mothers have a very strong bond with their mothers, they are very connected to the Chinese culture and because of this strong connection they are able to survive their hardship. For example, An Mei Hsu as a young girl remembers back in China how her beautiful widowed mother was "worthless in many respects" (Tan 266). Later, she is tricked into marriage by a wicked Second Wife, to her profane rich husband. As a result, she leads a miserable life, dishonored, and denied by her own family. In the end, she commits suicide in order to give her daughter An Mei a stronger spirit. An Mei talks about her mother with love and respect. She wants to be like her.

Another portrayal of a worthless married life is Lindo Jong, but Lindo has a strong spirit. Lindo is promised by her parents into marriage at two years old. At the end, making Chinese beliefs work for her, she is able to get out of the marriage without dishonoring her parents. As Lindo said, "I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents’ promise" (Tan 42). Lindo keeps her promise because she knows she does not have a choice. The Chinese mothers receive strong bonds from their mothers who passed down onto them from previous generation like a continuous link. Coming to America, that strong cultural bond is being broken with a new environment and different moral and societal values. The Chinese-American daughters are operated on a different values system. The only connection that they have with the mother land is through their mother’s determination to keep the memory alive.

In the traditional Chinese society, women are expected to behave silently with submission. The lamentation of An Mei’s mother about her situation does not save her from her fate, "That was China. . . . They had no choice. They could not speak up. They could not run away. That was their fate" (Tan 272). When learning of the failing marriage of her daughter Rose Hsu with Ted she can’t help but to think about fate, "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. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way" (Tan 241). The mothers’struggles against fate and the lack of choice seem to be the norm in China. On the other hand, in America the daughters’ difficulty involve making choices. For instance, Rose Hsu Jordan recalls that her problem is to make a decision. There are too many choices and she thinks that it is "so much to think about, so much to decide. Each decision meant a turn in another direction" (Tan 191). Her marital problem is caused by her inability to make a decision. She wants her husband to decide for everything. Is this due to her lack of connection to her mother? Or is it due to her lack of character? Her mother said that Rose Hsu was born without "wood" or she is confused all the time. Rose listen to too many people.

All four mothers have experienced some kind of extreme situation in China: war with Japan, famine, broken family, unhappiness, forced marriage. The survival of their ordeal in China creates their inner strength and wisdom that sustain them as they assimilate and lose some of their ethnic identity in the new world. The story of the mother of An Mei Hsu depicts an act of rare bravery. An Mei’s mother was dying. Out of devotion for her mother, she cuts a piece of her own flesh to cook it in the soup. This act does not save her mother from dying but it symbolizes the obligation that one has toward one’s parent. How could An Mei teaches her daughter Rose Hsu the value of self sacrifice when she does not have "wood" to balance the inside of herself, to give her strenght.

In addition to their cultural alienation, the first generation experience desintegration of family structure and conflict between mother and daughter. Even though the novel presents the stories of four different mothers, together they represent the old voice from China. One of the quality of the Confucian model is to hide his true feelings. Lindo Jong wants to learn of American ways even in China. She thinks that "it’s hard to keep your Chinese in America. At the beginning, before I even arrived, I had to hide my true self" (Tan 294). Lindo Jong tries to teach Waverly how to have a Chinese character: "How to obey parents and listen to your mother’s mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. . . . Why Chinese thinking is best" (Tan 289). Lindo, like all mothers, want their daughters to have the best of both worlds. They want them taking advantages from the opportunities in America while keeping their Chinese heritage. They want their daughters to obey, listen, be good Chinese daughters but the daughters wants their independence, their freedom, and they wants to have their own mind. They are ashamed of their mothers who picks their teeth in public, who speak broken English, who show them off to everybody. Jing-Mei Woo, out of frustration, blows her steam to her mother with, "I wasn’t [her] slave. . . . This wasn’t China. . . . She was the stupid one"(Tan 152) when her mother forces her to practice piano. This rebellion attitude causes the family structure to break down. The old world’s structure of a family is based primarily in obedience and submission; whereas, the new world is based on assertiveness and individuality.

In addition to the conflicts which arise from cultural differences, the language difficulty intensifies the tension between mothers and daughters. All mothers speak broken English mixed with Chinese causing the communication of feelings and ideas more difficult. As Shear states:

The communication barrier here is a double one, that between generations and that

created by the waning influence of an older culture and the burgeoning presence of

another. . . . Generally, the daughters tend to perceive cultural blanks, the absence of

clear and definite answers to the problems of family, whereas the mothers tend to fill

in too much, often to provide those kinds of cultural answers and principles that

seem to empower them to make strong domestic demands on their daughters. (194)

The mothers are the authority, the object of confrontation that the daughters are perceived from China. For instance, Jing Mei describes this communication gap, "My mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did. I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese" (Tan 23). Or "[m]y mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less what was said, while my mother heard more" (Tan 27). Jing-Mei Woo in her rebellion against the authority of her mother tries hard to deceive her. Her mother, who tries to transfer her dreams, her wisdom, her essence, is being resisted by a daughter who can’t understand her life story for lack of connection to the old world. For example, Jing-Mei asserts her own will, her "right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I droped out of college" (Tan 154). The daughters becoming young professionals strive to have an equality in their personal relationships and careers which are opportunities that Chinese mothers never have.

Out of frustration the mothers deal with their daughters through shouting in Chinese except Ying-Ying St Clair who lives like a ghost. Suyuan Woo shouts at Jing-Mei when she refuses to practice the piano: "[o]nly two kinds of daughters. . . . Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter" (Tan 153). Ying-Ying St Clair,r who has a deep scar on her psychic from her fall into the lake, becomes quiet since then. She keeps her thoughts to herself; "[m]y mother never talked about her life in China" (Tan 107) laments Lena, her daughter. So Ying-Ying communicates to her English-Irish husband through "moods and gestures, looks and silences, and sometimes a combination of English punctuated by hesitations and Chinese frustration" (Tan 108). And when she is alone with her daughter, she would speak in Chinese which Lena says, "[i] could understand the words perfectly, but not the meanings. One thought led to another without connection" (Tan 109). The daughters strive to understand the meanings of their mothers’advices. They try to make sense from their mothers’stories and hardship but they can only understand piece.

The "chi" that Ying Ying refers when she realizes that her daughter’s marriage is falling apart: "I must tell my daughter everything…She has no chi. This is my greatest shame. How can I leave this world without leaving her my spirit?" (Tan 252) All daughters due to their circumstances of upbringing in a land of abundance seem to have no "chi" or "wood" in them. Tan seems to suggest that "chi" is the desire to excel, a willingness to stand up for one’s self and one’s family, the inner strength, or the gut feelings. Lena St Clair has her mother’s help to stand up against her calculating husband. Rose Hsu lives in the shadow of her husband, she tries to please him in everything.

As a result from the strong cultural bond that the Chinese mothers carry in them, they are able to instill in their daughters the hope of having the best of both worlds. They want their daughters to succeed as an American and be good Chinese daughters at the same time. The daughters rebel and protest against their dominant mothers. They fight against their mothers’ wishes to be a prodigy, to excel, but in the end they are more connected to their heritage than they realize. They are successful in becoming architect, tax accountant, and copywriter. They belong to middle-class; they already fulfill their American dream. They did not want to listen to their mothers but despite of themselves they all become stronger. There is parallel in Amy Tan’s biography with the story of the daughters. Tan rebelled against her mother. She changed her major from neurosurgeon to linguistic. Her mother did not talk to her for six months, yet Tan became a successful writer instead of a neurosurgeon. So she did what her mother wants after all, to become successful.

In conclusion, the Joy Luck Club describes the hardship of its four members from China. They immigrate to America with the hope for a better life. It is the hope and the Chinese heritage that they instill into their daughters. These daughters rebel against their mothers due to cultural and linguistic differences but in the end they do what their mothers want inspite of themselves. Their mothers are being too strong, as Rose Hsu said, "More than thrity years later, my mother was still trying to make me listen" (Tan 208). The Chinese heritage is the common thread linking all characters in the novel together as Ben Xu observes astutely:

"Just as the mah-jong table is a linkage between the past and the present for the

club Aunties, Jing-Mei Woo. . . . becomes the frame narrator linking the two

generations of American Chinese, who are separated by age and cultural gaps and

yet bound together by family ties and a continuity of ethnic heritage. . . . These two

frame stories, ending of maturity, ethnic awakening, and return-to-home, not just

for Jing-Mei woo, but metaphorically for all daughter in the book" (14).

The return to China for Jin-Mei Woo signifies her rediscovery or reassertion of her ethnic identity. Jin-Mei Woo reconnects to her heritage after years of denial: "[t]he minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. . . . And I think, my mother was right. I am becoming Chinese" (Tan 306). Her mother assures her that "[o]nce you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese" (Tan 306). The trip to China represents for Jing-Mei an emotional reconnection to her two half-sisters and her family but also to her motherland China. She is fulfilling her mother’s dream of coming home when she said "I am going to China" (Tan 307).

"Confucius." Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 99. 1998.

Edwards, Jami. Rev of "The Joy Luck Club," by Amy Tan. The Book Report, Inc. 1999.

Internet.

Shear, Walter. "Generational Differences and the Diaspora." Critique

Spring 1993: 193-199.

Standley, Anne P. "Maxine Hong Kingston." Notable Asian Americans. Ed. Helen

Zia and Susan B. Gall. New York: Gale Research Inc., 1995: 164-6.

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Vintage Contemporaries. New York: A Division of

Random House, Inc. 1993.

Xu, Ben. "Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club."

Melus. V19. Spring 1994: 3-18.