The Joy Luck Club - Essay Example

Jing-mei (June May) Woo - The barriers between Chinese and American culture and the difficulty of shifting between cultures  The life story told by Jing-mei Woo raises the issue of a linguistic and cultural barrier that exists between each Chinese immigrant mother and their American born daughters, and the difficulty of overcoming them, in order to establish healthy family relations. Her narrative also serves as a bridge between the two generations of story tellers, and she provides voices for both herself and her recently deceased mother, Suyuan.

She wonders: “What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything. She was my mother. The aunties are looking at me as if I had become crazy right before their eyes… And then it occurs to me. 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 will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.

” (Tan 40-41) This quote establishes Jing-mei as a representative of the younger generation, while at the same time feeling a deep sympathy for the older generation. She understands the American-born daughters who feel they have lost their touch with their Chinese identities and feel as if they do not know their mothers. She also recognizes the mothers’ fears that for their daughters old values have no more meaning, “that to these closed American-born minds “joy luck” is not a word, it does not exist” (Tan 41), that they belong to an Americanized way of life and that in this effort to provide them with the best opportunities in life, the mothers have unintentionally secluded them from their Chinese heritage.

Jing-mei steps in her mother’s shoes for a weekly gathering, playing mahjong. She is being urged by her mother’s friends to go to China and tell the story of her mother’s life to her half-sisters, who fear, just like Jing-mei does, that the American daughters do not know how to appreciate the stories of their mothers. She lives in the false belief that her mother’s constant criticism speaks of a lack of affection, while in fact, her mother’s severity and high expectations are expressions of love and faith in her daughter, instilled by a different set of cultural values.

The same kind of misunderstanding is present in the relationships of other mother-daughter pairs. The Chinese tradition highly values filial obedience, expressions of love always bordering on criticism and lack of excessive portrayal of emotions, and it clashes harshly with the American ideas of free speech, self esteem and openly expressing one’s emotions. Even though Jing-mei fears that she cannot adequately portray her mother’s life to her half-sisters, she finally travels to China and helps them get to know a mother they do not remember: “I will remember everything about her and tell them” (Tan 41).

Because Suyuan’s story slowly permeates the novel via Jing-mei’s voice, the two stories finally merge together, reconciling Suyuan’s two lives, two cultures and a mother and daughter. This enables Jing-mei to bring closure to a painful wound and resolution to her mother’s story, but also her own. At the same time, this journey brings hope to the whole Joy Luck Club, because they become aware of the fact that, though very hard, it is possible to reconcile oppositions such as past and present, Chinese and American culture and those between generations of mothers and daughters.

Works cited: Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Penguin Group Inc, 2006. Print.