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Chapter One

Introduction

The book, “Introduction of English Criticism” defines Literature,

… deals with the great drama of human life and action. It is a vital record

of what men have seen in life, what they have experienced, what they

thought and felt about those aspects which have the most immediate and

enduring interest of all. Literature grows directly out of life which it

embodies. The classification of literature is not conventional or arbitrary. It

expresses the thoughts and feelings of a writer. Literature is fundamentally

an expression of life through the medium of language. (Hudson 9-10)

Asian American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States

by the writers of the Asian descent. It became a category during the 1970s but did not see

a direct impact in viewership in the 1970s. The term Asian American was created to

advocate the political solidarity and cultural nationalism. Asian American authors have

portrayed the Asian immigrant experience as seen by themselves than the eyes of

American mainstream press and literature by their writings. When Asian American

community gets matured, the writers move beyond the immediate immigrant experience.

Then they features Asian American characters of different ethnic backgrounds and often

retaining a focus on Asia.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese American immigrants were the first

Asian Americans to write about their experience in English. Their primary feeling is to

combat negative racist stereotypes held about the Chinese by the popular American press

and literature of the day. Edith Maude Eaton was the first Asian American writer, wrote

under the pen name of Sui Sin Far. Her short stories published in 1896 which painted an
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accurate picture of the struggles and aspirations of the first immigrants in America. Edith

Maude was followed by several other writers who marked a place in the Asian American

Literature.

The 1970s and 1980s saw a substantial rise of the Asian American writers who

focus on immigrant families. Mostly they focussed on the first and second generation

Asian immigrant protagonist captivated on enthusiastic readership. The common themes

were taken by the writers include race, culture, finding a sense of identity and Western

racism towards Asians. Long standing traditions have played a major role in shaping the

future of Asian Americans. C.Y. Lee, Frank Chin, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong

Kingston, Amy Tan and David Wong Louie were some of the authors become famous

among Asian Americans.

Most of the novels were made into musical which marked emphasis on their

culture and racism. They have contributed the development of Chinese American fiction

by new themes. Thereby they had given a new idea about the struggle of the immigrant

families. Currently active and acclaimed writers are Gish Jen, Jean Kwok, Shirley

Geoklin Lim, Sandra Tsing Loh and Shown Wong.

Many American writers sought topics generally linked to Asia. ‘An Anthology of

Asian American Writers’ (1974) collected lot of staples of long forgotten Asian American

literature. This anthology brought to light the necessity of visibility and criticism of the

literature of the time. They also criticised the lack of the visibility of the literature. The

writers have contributed the culture and race in the immigrant families.

Eileen Chang was born on 30 September 1920 in Shanghai, China. She is a

popular writer and a translator for the United States Informative Services. Her first

published novel is The Rice Sprout Song (1955), written entirely in English. She
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published her English Semi-Autobiographical novels, The Fall of Pagoda and The Book

of Change in 1963. In 1975, she completed the English Translation novel, The Shanghai

Flowers, a celebrated Qing novel written in Wu Chinese by Han Bang Qing. Chang has

been listed as one of the China’s four women geniuses together with Bicheng, Xiao Hong

and Shi Pingmei.

Iris Chang was born on 28 March 1986 in New Jersey, United States. As an

American Journalist; she pursued her Master’s degree in Writing Seminars at Johns

Hopkins University. Iris first work, Thread of the Silk (1995) tells the story of the Chinese

professor during the Red Scare in 1950. Iris’s subjects of her novels focuses on Chinese

Americans, Nanking Massacre and Tsein Hsue-shen. Her other novels includes, The Rape

of Nanking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), The Chinese in America

(2003). She also promoted the Chinese culture in America. The biography of Chang,

Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind by a

journalist Paula Kamen, published in 2007.

Frank Chin was born on 25 February 1940 in Berkeley, California. Being an

American playwright; he received American Book Award in 1989 for a collection of

short stories, The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco RR. Co. Frank won Lifetime achievement

award in 2000. His play, The Chicken coop Chinaman (1971) was the first Asian

American play on the New York stage. The traditional Chinese Folklore and stereotypes

of Asian Americans are the common themes used in his works. Chin is considered to be

one of the pioneers in Asian American theatre. He founded the Asian American Theatre

Workshop, which later became the Asian American Theatre Company in 1973. Other

plays, The Year of the Dragon (1974), Gee pop! (1976), Anthology of Asian American

Writers (1974), Donald Duck (1991), Gunga Din Highway (1994) and The Confessions of

a Number One Son: The Great Chinese American Novel (2015).

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Gao Xingjian was born on January 4, 1940 in Ganzhou, China. Gao was known as

the pioneer of absurdist drama in China. Though he is a noted translator, he was also a

playwright and a celebrated Painter. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in

2000 for “an oeuvre of universal validity, better insights and linguistic ingenuity”. Gao

produced as many number of plays, short stories, poems and critical pieces that had

eventually burn to avoid the consequences of his dissident literature. He published a short

poem Sky Burial, represents a modern style akin to his other writings. Other notable

works, Shelter; the Rain (1981), Signal Alarm (1982), Bus Stop (1983), Savages (1985),

The Other Shore (1986), Dark City (1988) , Soul Mountain (1989), Escape (1990),

Dialogue and Rhetorical (1992), One Man’s Bride (1999) and Snow in August (2000).

David Henry Hwang was born on 1957 in Los Angeles, California. David

received his Bachelor’s degree from Stranford University and attended Yale school of

Drama. His first play FOB was the Obie Award Winner. The best plays of David won

Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, the John Gasser Award and the Outer Circle

Award for Best Play. He was the first Asian American to win the Tony Award for Best

Play. David was appointed as the director of the Playwriting Concentration and an

Associate Professor of Theatre in play writings. Notable plays include The Dance and the

Railroad (1981), Family Devotions (1981), M. Butterfly (1988), Bondage (1992), Face

Value (1993), Golden Child (1998) and Chinglish (2011). David’s only Semi-

Autobiographical play is Yellow Face is published in 2007.

Gish Jen was born on August 12, 1955 in New York. She won Massachusetts

Booker prize in 2011, Lannan literary award, National Endowment for the Arts

Fellowship awards and Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award from the American

academy of Arts and Letters. Jen’s first novel, Typical American (1991), explores the

transformation of Chinese immigrants in the United States. Other novels include Mona in
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the Promised Land (1996), The Love Wife (2004) and World and Town (2010). She also

published a collection of short stories, Who’s Irish? (1999). Jen published a non-fictional

book in 2014, titled as Tiger: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self, explores East-

West differences in self construction.

Among these writers Amy Tan (1952- Present) is a popular name in Chinese

American fiction today. Being an American writer, she belongs to Chinese descent. Amy

was born on 19 February 1952 in Oakland, California. She is the second child of the three

children. Her parents are Chinese immigrants, Daisy and John Tan, an electrical engineer

and Baptist Minister. Amy’s older brother Peter and her father died of brain tumour at her

fifteenth year. Along with her mother, Tan and her younger brother John Jr. moved to

Switzerland. She finished her schooling at the Institute Monte Rosa, Montreux.

After the schooling of Amy, the family moved to America. She struggles a lot

with her parents desire to hold the Chinese traditions. But she had her own wish to

become more Americanized (integrated with American ideals). Though her parents

wanted her to become a Neurosurgeon (a doctor who performs surgery on the brain), she

wanted to be a Fiction Writer. Amy Tan began her college days at Linfield College in

Oregon and then went to San Jose State University in California. The main reason that

she went to the University of California is she had fallen in love with Lao DeMattai, an

Italian American. Later Tan married Lao in 1974. She did her doctoral linguistics studies

at US Santa Crux and UC Berkeley.

In early 1970s, Tan fulfils her mother’s desire of becoming a surgeon. After her

graduation work in the University of California and Berkeley, Tan began her work as a

Technical writer (a person who writes about mechanical and computer issues). When she

was in school she worked on odd jobs- switch board operator, carhop, bartender, and
 6
pizza maker. Before her writing career gets started she spends most of her time in reading

the novels of the time. Most of the novels inspired her. The most important novel which

inspired Tan is the fiction of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, focuses on the Native

American family. By the inspiration of the fiction, Tan turned herself from technical

writer to a fiction writer. Amy was happened to know about her mother’s former marriage

at China and how her mother was forced to leave her children from the previous marriage

in Shanghai. Later she got the news that her two half sisters are alive in China.

Amy Tan’s literary career was not well planned. She started her fiction writing as

a form of therapy. Being a workaholic, Tan had been working for ninety hours per week

as a freelance technical writer. She decided to move her career by jumping into jazz piano

lessons and writing fictions instead. Her first literary efforts were the stories earned her a

position in the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, a fiction workshop. The incident

which happened to her mother, to lose her children in Shanghai is the basis for the first

novel. Tan developed her hobby into a new career as a writer in fiction by the publication

of the first novel, The Joy Luck Club in 1989.

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club received the American Library Association’s best

book for Young adult award in 1989. She stayed on the New York Times best seller list

for nine months. In the mean time Amy become a producer and script writer for the

movie The Joy Luck Club in 1993. It was also acted on stage in a production directed by

Tisa Chang for Pan Asian Repertory in 1999.

Amy Tan’s writing style is about the Chinese American culture combined with

life stories. She gives the reader an opportunity to gain knowledge about the way of her

life, family and friends. The purpose of her writing is only to educate people about

growing up as a minority. Tan stories give a “lucidity of vision”. She wrote about her
 7
experiences, her relatives experiences and fellow Chinese-Americans living in America.

She introduces the life of Chinese American. Tan was strongly influenced by her

mother’s story telling about the family’s Chinese heritage and later used story telling as a

device in her fictions. She uses the narrative technique in her fiction, The Joy Luck Club.

The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The

Bonesetter’s Daughter (2000), Saving fish from Drowning (2005) and The Valley of

Amazement (2013) are the other novels of Amy Tan. The themes of generational

differences among Chinese American families, as well as mother-daughter relationship,

specifically, the one shared by Jing-Mei Woo and her mother Suyuan Woo, were used by

Amy Tan in her novels. Other minor themes include: cultural clashes, friendship, love,

symbolism, immigrant identity and sexism. She embraces the American dream that every

American can succeed.

Amy had also written two children novels: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the

Chinese Siamese cat (1994), in which both the works later turned into an animated series

that was aired in PBS. Her non-fictional work was entitled as Mid-Life Confidential: The

Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Cards and an Attitude (1994),

Mother (1996), The Best American Short stories (1999), The Opposite of Fate: A Book of

Musings (2003) and Hard Listening (2013). All her novels mostly deal with the theme of

relationship between an immigrant mother and her American born daughter.

Amy Tan is keenly alive in expressing her theme in a better way. She is very

much concerned with the problems faced by the immigrants of Chinese mothers and their

upbringing daughters in America. The daughters are trying to get adjusted with their

Chinese mothers as they are forcing them to follow the Chinese traditions. Later Tan’s
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novels are adapted into films, plays and television operas. Her novel, The Joy Luck Club

was acted in Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York.

Amy Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club, is a bestselling novel, and captures

many moods in which the story is about her own experience. It focuses on four Chinese

American immigrant families in San Francisco, California, who started a club known as

“the Joy Luck Club”, playing the Chinese game of Mah-jong for money while feasting on

a variety of foods. The three mothers and the four daughters share stories about their life

in the form of vignettes. In 1993, the novel was adapted into a feature film directed by

Wayne Wang.

Her second novel, The Kitchen God’s Wife published in 1991, deals extensively

with Sino-American female identity. The novel opens with the narrative voice of the main

character Pearl Louie Brandt, American born daughter of a Chinese mother. The principle

theme is the struggle of females in a patriarchal society and issues faced by the

immigrants and their children. Set largely in early 1990s California and China during

World War II, focusing the lives of the Chinese women under the Japanese occupation of

China and the brutality inflicted on them by occupying forces.

The novel, The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), was a departure from the first two

novels in focusing on the relationship between sisters. The themes in the novel are about

the journey of identity, family, history, past lives and ultimately love. It deals on the

relationship between Chinese born Kwan and her younger Chinese sister Olivia, who

serves as the book’s primary narrator. The novel pours out many things that can be only

understood by the “Hundred Secret Senses” and also through our five senses.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) reveals a new technique that a story is written

within the story, deals with the relationship between an American born Chinese women
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Ruth and her immigrant mother Lu Ling. Ruth finds her Mother’s past life in a small

village called Immortal Heart. The Bonesetter’s Daughter is divided into two major

stories, first is about Ruth and the other is Lu Ling herself, written for Ruth.

Another novel, Saving fish from Drowning published in 2005, explores the

tribulations experienced by a group of people who disappear while on an art expedition in

the jungles of Burma. The story is spoken by the first hand narrative of Bibi Chen, the

tour leader for the American tourists. The themes of the novel are relationships,

insecurities and hidden strengths of the tourists, which were set against the uneasy

political situation in Burma. It was supposedly passed along through automatic writing.

Rules for Virgins, a short extract from the novel, “The Valley of Amazement” was

published independently in 2012. Set in a brothel, in Shanghai, the story reads like a long

lecture. The most intriguing parts are when Tan touches on the backgrounds of the two

women at the single’s centre. Magic gourd and violet are the main characters in the

extract. A personal tragedy has shaped Magic gourd’s views on her life and career and the

story ends disappointed.

Amy Tan’s next novel, The Valley of Amazement (2013), partly set in historical

China. It reveals the mother-daughter relationship. The novel is divided into two parts;

first part is about Violet telling the story of growing up in Hidden Jude Path, a courtesan

house in Shanghai and the separation of the mother and the daughter. The other focuses

on the story told by the mother, who thinks her daughter, Violet, is dead. When the novel

ends Violet reunite with her mother and eventually also her daughter, Flora.

Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989) won the Commonwealth gold award

which captures the moods of the people by revealing the experiences of four Chinese

American mother-daughter pairs. The novel is mainly divided into four parts: Feather
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from a thousand Li valley, The Twenty six Malignant Gates, American Translation and

the Queen mother of the Western Skies. These parts are further divided into four sections

to create sixteen chapters. Each part is preceded by a parable relating to the game.

In 1949, the four mothers meet at the First Baptist church in San Francisco and

agree to continue to meet to play mah jong. United in loss and new hope for their

daughter’s futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. The daughters never heard the

stories of the mother’s, think that their mother’s advice is irrelevant to their modern

American lives until; their own inner crises reveal how much they have unknowingly

inherited of their mother’s pasts.

Cultural Indifferences deals with the differences between the cultures of America

and China. The story presents the sufferings of American daughters and Chinese mothers

based on the different cultures. The mothers are trying to control their daughters and the

daughter’s wishes to free from their mothers. In the story of Waverly, her mother Lindo

doesn’t like her daughter to marry an American, Rich. The language creates a rift between

the cultures as the daughters speak ‘Perfect English’ and the mothers spoke fractured

English. The cross-cultural misunderstanding made the daughters to separate from their

mothers because of the differences in two cultures.

The central theme of the novel focuses on Mother-daughter relationship. All the

mothers, An-Mei Hsu, Suyuan Woo, Lindo Jong and Ying Ying st. Clair, try to exercise

their motherly power and authority. They wanted their daughters to live a better and

happy life by their own. Even though the mothers are separated from their daughters, they

maintain a good relationship between them. In the episode of Jing-Mei’s story, Jing had

no interest in playing piano right from her childhood. She merely hated it. But after her

mother’s encouragement and support, she learned and proved her talent which was hidden
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in her for a long time. Mothers act as a supporter to their daughters whenever they are in

trouble and in confused state in taking decisions. Rose Hsu Jordan is requested by her

mother An-Mei, not to separate herself from her husband Ted.

The chapters of the novel are narrated in first person in the present tense, but each

part is filled with flashbacks. The tale is set in or around San Francisco, including the

homes of the mothers and their adult daughters. It is a tale of mothers and daughters, most

of them narrate two chapters, at least, even the point of the view changes throughout the

novel. The Methodology used in writing this dissertation is in accordance with the

seventh edition of MLA Handbook for the writers of the Research paper.
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Chapter Two

Cultural Indifferences

The word ‘Culture’ is derived from the French word ‘cultura’ which means to

grow, to develop and to expand. Culture is the way of living which a group of people has

developed and transmits from one generation to the next generation. Race, ethnicity, class

and gender are cultural creations. In brief,

Culture is originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires

most of its later modern meanings in the writings of the eighteenth century

German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau’s

criticism of modern liberalism and Enlightment. It is full of expression of

unique or authentic self. (Velkley 172)

People are living in a multicultural globalize world. When people emigrate from

one country to other countries, cultures meet and influence each other. Sometimes the

impact of one culture is much greater than another culture. “Ideas regarding national or

even ethnic cultural identity become more difficult to apply in situations where

traditional, cultural norms and identities meet and mix” (Ryan 196). The first-generation

immigrants usually have comprehensive links with their homeland. They do not lose their

sense of cultural and personal identity. But in case of second-generation immigrants, there

is a change; they were not so closely connected with their homeland. The children of the

first-generation immigrants find it difficult for them to build a cultural identity.

The concept hybrid deals with the meeting of two different cultural traditions. The

idea of a Chinese American culture is formed by the two separate traditions that mix in

time and space. But it ignores the idea that neither Chinese nor American culture is

homogeneous. They are already together in a hybrid form. Hybridized culture is

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mentioned by “divided along the lines of religion, class, gender, age, nationality and so

on” (Barker 71). Culture is something to be caused by the different ways that make the

sense of the world. In fact the cultural differences have been taken as an important theme

of the Asian American novels.

The Joy Luck Club explores the clash differences the Chinese culture and

American culture. The only way in understanding the difference of these cultures is to

look at the communication in these cultures. Chinese culture is classified as high-context

culture whereas American culture is classified as low-context culture. The significance of

these two cultures is explained in The Joy Luck Club.

A high-context culture is a culture in which the individual has to be acquires

cultural information and meaning from obedience to authority through observation. They

are highly stable and slow to change. They are rooted in the past and cohesive cultures.

China is the best example for the high-context culture. A low-context culture is the one in

which the communication between each other is unclear. They are taken from the

particular situation or an event. The bond among the people is very strong in the high-

context culture. The United States is the best example for the low-context culture. Jade

Snow Wong about the high-context culture, Chinese culture, in her novel ‘Fifth Chinese

Daughter’:

Jade Snow thought she was tiresome and ignorant. Every people knew that

the Chinese people had a superior culture. Her ancestors had created a

great art heritage and made inventions important to world civilization…

She had often heard Chinese people discuss the foreigners and their

strange ways, but she would never have thought of running after one of

them and screaming with pointed finger. (Guerin 299)

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The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan’s first novel (1989) written in English and about

Chinese American. Although it is also her most celebrated novel which uses sophistically

and highly innovative narrative technique. It evoked some adverse comments from the

other writers when it was awarded the National Book Award and the Commonwealth

Gold Award. The comment made by Amy Ling’s remark in ‘An Introduction to the

Writing and their social context’, “The absent motherland looms large on the horizon of

the emigrant mothers whose unspeakable tragedies left behind in China, resonate

recounted in vivid detail in The Joy Luck Club, resonate in their daughters, Amy Tan

herself being one of the daughters” (Kim 438).

The title of the novel is apt and suggestive. It has been used for reproducing the

formal structure of a game of mah-jong. The game has the gaming troops to dramatize the

relationship between four Chinese immigrants’ mothers and their American born

daughters. These games in turn made a paradoxical connection between freedoms and

constrain through assimilation which transform Chinese immigrant into Asian Americans.

The Joy Luck Club is a touching story of the four Chinese mothers. Each mother

feels the pain of the cultural separation between themselves and their daughters. Jing-Mei

is the main protagonist of the novel. When the novel begins her mother, Suyuan Woo

died two months ago. Suyuan was the host of the joy luck club, but after her death the

other members request Jing-Mei to take her mother’s place in the joy luck club. When

Jing-Mei is with her mother’s friends in the joy luck club meeting, Aunt Ying begins to

tell about Jing-Mei’s mother, Suyuan, and about her lost twin daughters:

I think your mother die with an important thought on her mind, she says in

halting English. And then she begins to speak in Chinese, calmly, softly.

Your mother was a strong woman, a good mother. She loved you very
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much, more than her life. And that’s why you can understand why a

mother like this could never forget her other daughters. She knew they

were alive, and before she died she wanted to find her daughters in China.

(33)

The mothers always remember their older days. While they are talking and

playing in the joy luck club, they felt a lot on thinking about their Chinese life. Jing-Mei

remembers her mother, Suyuan who tells about An-Mei. She remembers her little brother

in China with his family, needs only the money of An-Mei and nothing more. “Auntie

An-Mei had cried before left for China, thinking she would make her brother very rich

and happy by communist standards. But when she got home, she cried to me that

everyone had a palm out and she was the only one who left with an empty hand” (29).

Chinese culture presents an ancient tradition for saving an individual; a sacrifice

might cure a dying family member. It is mentioned in the story by An-Mei Hsu. When

she was four years old, her Popo, grandmother, was in her dead bed. Everyone in the

family tried a lot to save Popo but she was in her last stage. Popo’s daughter, mother of

An-Mei had left the home and married Wu Tsing , a married man. She came back to see

her mother once for the last time, after hearing that her mother is about to die. An-Mei

saw her mother was cooking a soup for her mother by adding a softest part of her arm.

She was shocked for a while and says:

I saw my mother on the other side of the room. Quiet and sad. She was

cooking a soup, pouring herbs and medicines into the streaming pot. And

then I saw her pull up her sleeve and pull out a sharp knife. She put this

knife on the softest part of her arm. I tried to close my eyes, but could not.

And then my mother cut a piece of meat from her arm. Tears poured out
 16
from her face and blood spilled to the floor. My mother took her flesh and

put it in the soup. She cooked magic in the ancient tradition to try to cure

her mother this one last time. (45)

A person does not disclose his secrets until the right moment comes, and then he

reveals the secrets for his own personal gain. Lindo herself used this strategy to extricate

herself from an arranged marriage without dishonouring her parents promise to her

husband’s family. During the marriage day, the matchmaker lights the candle and if the

candle lighted up to the next morning, the marriage should not be broken, this is the way

in which the marriage was happened to Lindo Jong with her husband Tyan-yu, but it was

broken. She explains:

I was not thinking when my legs lifted me up and my feet ran across the

courtyard to the yellow-lit room. But I was hoping- I was praying to

Buddha, the goddess of mercy and the full moon- to make that candle go

out. It fluttered a little and the flame bent down low, but still both ends

burned strong. My throat filled with so much hope that it finally burst and

blew out my husband’s end of the candle. (61)

Tyan-yu does not have any interest on Lindo and her mother-in-law, Huang Taitai

scolds her for not being pregnant. She notices a servant girl was pregnant by the delivery

man. Lindo devised a plan to make the Huangs to end the marriage. She pretends that she

had a dream in which the ancestors came to her and revealed that matchmaker’s servant

allowed Tyuan-yu’s end of the candle to go out and if he stayed in the marriage he will

die. Furthermore, she adds that the ancestors reveal that the child is Tyuan-yu’s and it was

of royal blood. Finally, Lindo was granted a divorce and he married the servant girl.
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The cultural differences between the mothers and daughters create a barrier

because of contrasting values. The desire to “speak perfect English” is another cultural

difference in the novel. The barrier that exists between the mother and the daughters are

mostly due to their lack of ability to communicate with each other. The prologue says,

“This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good

intentions. And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in

perfect American English” (5). She is saying that there is a language gap among the

mothers and the daughters.

The culture of China presents a tradition, if anyone who wishes anything on the

Moon day, the wish may get fulfilled. Ying-Ying remembers her earlier days with her

mother. She was quite happy on the moon day, enjoying herself with other family

members. She asks about the speciality of the Moon day. Her mother replies that if

anyone wishes on the Moon day without others knowledge to the Moon lady, the wish

gets fulfilled. Ying- Ying mother replies: “Chang-o. She lives on the moon and today is

the only day you can see her and have a secret wish fulfilled” (73). Later she made a wish

to the Moon lady, but the lady who is acting changes as a man and her wish become an

illusion.

In ‘Rules of the Game’, the cross-cultural misunderstanding causes a conflict

between Lindo and her daughter Waverly is the dispute on how to play chess. Lindo took

great pride in Waverley’s talent in chess. She makes her follow her to every shop that she

visits, buying little things, for the purpose of introducing her daughter to the shopkeepers.

Waverley misunderstands her mother’s pride in her achievements. She also thinks that her

mother wants to take credit of her success and she expresses her resentment towards her

mother:
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She used to discuss my games as if she has devised the strategies. “I told

my daughter, use your horses to run over the enemy,” she informed one

shopkeeper. “She won very quickly this way”. And of course, she had said

this before the game-that and a hundred other useless things that had

nothing to do with my winning. I hated the way she tried to take all the

credit. And one day I told her so, shouting at her on Stockton Steer, in the

middle of a crowd of people. I told her she didn’t know anything, so she

shouldn’t show off. She should shut up. (200-201)

The conflict between the mother and daughter is constructed as a cultural

differences American culture vs. Chinese culture. American culture promotes

individualism whereas Chinese culture supports collectivism. In collectivistic cultural

orientation, the view of the individual is different from that of the individualistic cultural

orientation. Contrary to American culture, individualism is not supported in Chinese

culture. Chinese culture is a family oriented culture and the institution of family is the

pinnacle of the society. Lindo grows up in that culture, places great importance on the

family and its unity. American people view themselves as independent and separate from

others. Lindo gets separate herself from the family as she thinks that her mother had took

pride of her daughter’s achievements instead of lindo getting happy.

The mothers in the novel, The Joy Luck Club, suffer a lot in China. They never

reveal to anyone about the suffering happened to them in the past. They were always

concern about their daughters as nothing should harm them. When the mothers had left

from China to America, they have to change their own identity. They do not even know to

speak in English, but somehow they managed themselves. Lena ever gets to know about

her mother’s first marriage and the abortion, in China. She even had changed her identity

from her Chinese to American. Her daughter, Lena says:

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My mother never talked about her life in china, but my father said he

saved her from a terrible life there, some tragedy she could not speak

about. My father proudly named her in her immigration papers: Betty St.

Clair, crossing out her given name of Gu Ying-Ying. And then he put

down the wrong birth year, 1916 instead of 1914. So, with the sweep of a

pen, my mother lost her name and became a Dragon instead of a Tiger.

(115)

Lena’s mother, Ying-Ying saw danger in everything. Once, while Lena and Ying-

Ying were both walking in the road, Ying gets afraid of a “red faced Chinese man”, who

came running to her considering as his lady love, Suzie Wong. After the incident Ying

rearranges the room of Lena: “My bed is no longer by the window but against the wall”

(121).

Rose Hsu Jordan dates with Ted, her mother An-Mei, felt ashamed because Ted is

an American. Her older sisters dated only the Chinese boys from church before they got

married. “He is an American”, warned my mother, as if I had been too blind to notice.

“I’m American too,” I said (P 133). From the story of Rose Hsu, everyone can found that

the daughters are highly influenced by America that they speak even against of their

mothers. The mother had believed in god and she reads, The Holy Bible, when her son,

Bing had fallen in the sea. While the family went for a picnic, they had a new experience:

“a Chinese family trying to act like a typical American family in the beach” (139).

The dispute arises with the mother’s attempt to maintain control and the daughters

wish to run free. This episode is about Jing’s Piano lesson. Lacking talent and drive, Jing,

decided not to practise seriously. As a result, her piano recital ended in disaster because

of the talented show fiasco, Jing believed that she is not going to play piano any more, if
 20
anyone forces or not. Given the psychological importance of self-esteem in American

culture, it is not surprising that Jing, who has learnt to have high regard for her, feels that

she is adequate and her mother does not have any right to change her.

When Suyuan finds her daughter in front of the TV, instead of practising piano, a

conflict arises. She demands her daughter to switch off the TV, but never hears on

anything. She articulates her thoughts: “I didn’t budge. And then I decided. I didn’t have

to do what my mother said anymore. I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China. I had listened

to her before and look what happened” (163). Suyuan believes her daughter and her

ability, does not accepts no for an answer. The story is narrated in daughters’ point of

view and through her pain comes the sympathy of the American reader, who feels for her.

It’s her preference to watch TV and not to practice in piano.

In contrast to Chinese culture, the pursuit of happiness is essential in American

culture. To be happy is the basic value for Americans. In Lindo’s view everything is done

for the sake of the family’s well being and not on the basis of personal happiness.

American born daughters complain about being unhappy, because their mothers force

them to work hard toward success. When Jing failed in her piano recital, she anticipated a

reaction from her mother, “I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could

shout back and cry and blame her for all my misery” (163).

The mothers wish their daughters to know the power and advantage of joining the

strengths of two cultures: the culture of success and the culture of secrets and wisdoms. In

the beginning the daughters never hear the advice of their mothers, but at last they begin

to listen to their mothers. When Rose’s husband asks for a divorce, she was paralyzed

with shock. She is wakened by her mother by a phone call. She asks some suggestions to

his friend, Lena and his psychiatrist. Ted started his started to sign the divorce papers.
 21
Rose decides to end this divorce torture, but she remembers of the house both Ted and

Rose had lived after their marriage, and the garden in front of the house. Rose explains:

And I was just about to take the papers out of the coupon drawer when I

remembered the house. I thought to myself, I love this house. The big oak

door that opens into a foyer filled with stained-glass windows. The

sunlight in the breakfast room, the south view of the city from the front

parlour. The herb and flower garden Ted had planted. He used to work in

the garden every week end, kneeling on a green rubber pad, obsessively

inspecting every leaf as if he were manicuring fingernails. He assigned

plants to certain planter boxes. Tulips could not be mixed with perennials.

A cutting of Aloe Vera that Lena gave me did not belong anywhere

because we had no other succulents... And seeing the garden in this

forgotten condition reminded me of something. (229)

When Rose does not sign the divorce papers, he calls her and tells that he is going

to marry another lady. This episode shows that an American can marry as much number

of women, if he likes to do so, as he is divorced by his wife. When Rose hears of another

marriage by Ted, she puts a condition to let her keep their house. She refuses to uproot

her and throw her away. For the first time in her life she stands for herself and is ready to

fight for what she wants. After much trouble Rose provides divorce to Ted.

Hope is the value that is highly esteemed in every culture, especially in Chinese

culture. In The Joy Luck Club, most of the transformations are accomplished through

hope, understanding and life circumstances. In the first vignette, there is a Chinese

woman, hopes for a daughter whom she is dreaming of having in America. The woman

presents a gift to her future daughter “swan feather” that comes from afar. Likewise,
 22
Suyuan presents a “piano” to her daughter, Jing-Mei for her birthday. The gift is a hope

given by the mother to a daughter.

Another significant event, Jing receives from her mother, a Jade pedant, after the

dinner party on the Chinese day. Jing helps her mother in selecting the finest crabs for the

party. All the members of the Joy Luck Club came to the party and they enjoyed a lot.

After the party, Suyuan presents a Jade pedant to her daughter and says, “For a long time,

I wanted to give you this necklace. See, I wore this on my skin, so when you put it on

your skin, then you know my meaning. This is your life’s importance” (250). After her

mother’s death, the gift becomes a testimony of maternal wisdom and love, which she

misinterpreted for superstition and criticism. This pedant symbolises the Chinese culture

and Jing become a bearer of Chinese culture.

Throughout the novel, there are various narrators who can mediate on their ability

to translate concepts and values from one culture to another. This proves that the

generation gap appears in between the mothers and daughters extend into many aspects of

life. The mothers and daughters should attempt a cross cultural translation whose success

depends not only on their mastering the English and Chinese languages, but also on their

understanding of American and Chinese cultures. The reason is that the Chinese mothers

cannot skilfully use and understand the language, nor the culture of America, their

translation often fails to convey the full meaning of their stories. So the mothers use story

telling as a method for passing on their personal values and advice.

In ‘Magpies’, An-Mei tells a story to her daughter, Rose Hsu to know about the

values and tradition of Chinese, when she came to visit Popo at times of her illness. When

An-Mei was young, she sat crying by the pond when a turtle surfaced. It tells that had

eaten her tears and it knows about the misery of An-Mei. The turtle warns that if she cries
 23
her life will be sad. It requests her to enjoy the life and spattered the tears in the form of

“magpies”, birds of joy. An-Mei explains:

That night, after Popo told me this, I sat by the pond, looking into the

water. And because I was weak, I began to cry. Then I saw this turtle

swimming to the top and his beak was eating my tears as soon as they

touched the water. He ate them quickly, five, six, seven tears, then climbed

out of the pond, crawled onto a smooth rock and began to speak. The turtle

said, ‘I have eaten your tears, and this is why I know your misery. But I

must warn you. If you cry, your life will always be sad’. (259)

Now after years, An-Mei wants to pass all the valuable lessons to her daughter, to

stand up for herself or to make decisions. Rose has allowed her husband, Ted to make all

decisions in their marriage, but when she asks her to take on some responsibility, Rose’s

relationship with her husband crumbles. Ted asks for a divorce and tries to buy his way

out of the marriage for ten thousand dollars. An-Mei tries to communicate with her

daughter, to make her to see Ted’s manipulative ways, but Rose avoids conversation

about him. The daughters think that their mothers are trying to interfere with their lives to

their inability to stand and consent American culture, especially values independence,

anatomy and personal happiness. This is the main reason that they refuse to hear their

mothers. An-Mei shows her loving concern for her daughter saying:

I know how it is to live your life like a dream. To listen and watch, to

wake up and try to understand what has already happened. You do not

need a psychiatrist to do this. A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up.

He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears
 24
into it. And really, he is just another bird drinking from your misery. (290-

291)

The Chinese horoscope holds a vital significance in Chinese culture and in

Chinese mentality. This has been emphasized in the novel, The Joy Luck Club. The

Chinese believe that the animal ruling one’s birth year has a profound influence on

personality and destiny. After losing the cultural identity, Ying-Ying cannot associate

herself as Chinese or American. She allows her husband to control every aspects of life,

mistranslate her feelings and her thoughts. Ying-Ying thinks, she is married to Clifford,

American, because of fate and destiny. In the same way, she believed it was the fate to

marry her first husband, who left her when she was pregnant. Ying-Ying says, “I was

born in the year of the Tiger. It was a very bad year to be born, a very good year to be a

Tiger. That was the year a very bad spirit entered the world” (301).

Waverley and Lindo’s relationship is severely damaged by their cultural

differences. Waverley lives in between two worlds with two diverse cultures, the Chinese

culture at home and the American culture outside the home. These two cultures are

extremely different from each other and it is very difficult for her to handle the situation.

Unable to balance her life between the two cultures, she chooses to go with the dominant

culture, American culture. Lindo emphasizes, Waverley follows her mother’s “Chinese

ways” only until she learns how to go to school by herself. Waverley never looks like a

Chinese. Lindo says:

I use my American face. That’s the face Americans think is Chinese, the

one they cannot understand. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is

my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother but she is not
 25
proud of me. Mr. Rory pats my hair more. He looks at me. He looks at my

daughter. (310)

Many individual choices have been made by the mothers as well as the daughters

throughout the course of the novel, but the most important are that of Jing’s decision to

travel to China. When she starts her journey towards her homeland, it is clear that a cross

cultural self is made in the novel. She describes how excited she was when the train was

entering China:

The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen,

China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my

blood rushing throw a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old

pain. And I think my mother was right. I am becoming Chinese. (325)

Jing’s experience in China certainly seems to the concept of cultural hybridity.

She found China itself contains American cultural aspects, just as a part of America she

grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, contains cultural elements. Thus, her first meal in

China consists of hamburgers and apple pie, on the request of her Chinese relatives. The

sisters help Jing to know about their mother’s story in China. Jing finally takes her first

step fully by discovering, accepting and appreciating her Chinese heritage. By travelling

to her mother’s homeland, she creates a bridge between China and America.

The daughters in these stories are concerned with American attitudes and habits.

First generation children all go by their American names and not Chinese. Jing-Mei is

known as June and the name is American not Chinese. The different languages come with

different thinking system, in which Chinese family living in America has two minds of

the linguistic experiences. People who live in a society, which is dominated by certain

culture, have to adapt the dominant culture.

 26
The linguistic barriers have triggered many misunderstandings between both

Chinese speaking mothers and English speaking daughters and between persons who

speak different Chinese dialects. The mothers speak a mixture of fractured English and

they feel comfortable in Chinese languages, so they often use the languages. The words

that the mothers use in Chinese languages are: pichi, ching ching, chiszle, syaumei,

shemma bende ren, shwo buchulai, mei gwansyi, dindsying tamende shenti, nikhan,

choszle and chunwang chihan.

There are great differences between the East and the West, between China and

America. The story involves the various differences with the cultural difference as the

mainstream. The different point in the stories enables us to look at the bitter sweet

mother- daughter relations from the cultural and generational angles. The daughters think

themselves as Americans and resist their mother’s attempts to change them into obedient

Chinese daughters. In fact, they are transferring their own hopes to their daughters. There

exists the conflict between different cultures and different generations.

 27
Chapter Three

Mother-Daughter Relationship

Relationship means a connection between two people or countries that deals with

each other. It is the basic foundation of any culture. There is no human development

without relationship. It is an important aspect for the exploration of human emotions and

intellectual variations. Geetha Gangatharan says, “Human relationship is what a writer is

involved with person to person and person to society relationship. My preoccupation is

with interpersonal relationships and human emotions” (Pathak 252).

Mother-daughter relationship is an important issue in the domain of creative

writing in English by women writers. In most cultures the relationship remains

unrecognised. Mother-daughter relationship is a mixture of love and hostility,

expectations and disappointments, and conflicts and reconciliation. Only when the

daughters become older and mature, they begin to know about their identity as a mother.

In the novel The Thousand Faces of Night, Githa deals with the theme of mother-daughter

relationship. The story focuses the theme when the daughter, Devi returns from Madras

she feels about her relation with mother is only as ‘one-celled unit’:

Amma and I did not touch each other and we certainly did not talk about

love, for each other or anyone else. But in the first few weeks after my

return to Madras, we were intensely conscious of each other… Drawn

together, my dead father’s memory receding for the moment, we became a

one-celled unit. We became not a family, but mother and daughter.

(Hariharan 13)

The novel, kanyadaan also reveals the relationship of mother and daughter, as the

mother Seva feels for her daughter Jyothi, after the marriage. Seva says:
 28
After your marriage that atmosphere of this house has changed. And do

you think you have remained the same, Jyothi? You live here like a

stranger taking shelter in this house out of sheer necessity. You are no help

to us, nor are we able to depend on you. You are lost in yourself. If you go

out we don’t know when you will return, and when you do return it is like

this! Like a stranger… (Tendulkar 33)

Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club proceeds with the theme of mother-daughter

relationship. Mothers and daughters treat one another cautiously by playing a game of

love and fear, need and rejection. Amy Ling reviews that, “The mothers are so strong that

they endure all manner of pain to enforce their will, to show their love. The daughters,

equally strong, find ways to rebel, if not openly in them in secret” (Kim 442).

The chasm between mothers and daughters can be examined as caused by the very

contrary places and manners in which they were brought up. This had made them very

different and almost capable of understanding each other. Tan constantly holds up one

world against another, in an attempt to research deeply about the secrets and release its

essence. Furthermore, in The Joy Luck Club the voices of the Chinese mothers and

American daughters feel the presence of another generation of mothers- the American

daughter’s grandmothers. They were dead in China at the time of storytelling, but they

were in their turn with reversed forces in their daughter’s life once again. The influences

of the grandmothers are passed in to the life of the grand daughters, who could never

hope to know them.

Besides Amy Tan, the lives of Suyuan Woo and Jing-Mei Woo had a mother-

daughter relationship. Jing-Mei had never lived up to Suyuan’s expectations during her

life time, because Jing doesn’t know about the past of her mother. Most of the conflicts
 29
that Jing and her mother faces are based on misunderstanding and negligence concerning

each other’s feelings and emotions. One of the misunderstandings is that, Suyuan had lost

her two daughters in China, and her entire family was killed in the war. She leaves the

place behind her and came to live in America. Even though Suyuan had lost her twin

daughters in China she wants very best of her daughter Jing. But Jing never understands

her mother and thinks of the twin sisters after her mother’s death as:

I think. I was not those babies. The babies in a sling on her shoulder. Her

other daughters. And now I feel as if I were in Kweilien amidst the

bombing and I can see these babies lying on the side of the road , their red

thumbs popped out of their mouths, screaming to be reclaimed. Somebody

took them away. They’re safe. And now my mother’s left me forever, gone

back to China to get these babies. (33)

Suyuan places all her hopes in America and her family here. She had given full

freedom to do whatever her daughter likes to do in her life. Jing feels that her mother will

always be at her side at every time. Suyuan had selected the name Jing-Mei, for her

daughter, means ‘the pure, essential, best quality younger sister’. Suyuan tells her

daughter that she can be anything she wants to be, and that she has great talent. To make

her daughter successful Suyuan forces her daughter to learn in different areas such as

dance, academics, trivia and piano. So she believes her and it explains as:

My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You

could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get retirement. You

could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could

become instantly famous. “Of course you can be prodigy, too,” my mother told me when

I was nine. “You can be best anything” (151).

 30
The relationship between An-Mei Hsu and Rose Hsu Jordan shows that language

is a brick wall, because they don’t understand why they want and what they want. Rose

doesn’t care to save her marriage with Ted; she only wants to get the house. An-Mei

wants her daughter, Rose to fight for her marriage, because it is the only way to keep her

honour among her family. Her mother says:

“Why do you not speak up for yourself?” she finally said in her pained

voice. “Why can you not talk to your husband?” “Ma” I said, feeling

drained. “Please. Don’t tell me to save my marriage anymore. It’s hard

enough as it is”. “I am not telling you to save your marriage,” she

protested. “I only say you should speak up”. (231)

An-mei was born in China and raised up in China, but not by her mother. Her

mother becomes the concubine of another man when An-Mei’s father had died. So An-

Mei and her little brother went to live with their Popo. They never talk about An-Mei’s

mother. But, when Popo becomes sick she came back to look after her mother. When she

saw Popo in bad condition she cuts apiece off and pits it into soup for Popo. This was to

show a great respect shown by An-Mei’s mother towards her own mother. She says,

“Here is how I came to love my mother. How I saw in her my own true nature. What was

beneath my skin. Inside my bones” (45). From this point An-Mei thought of respect and

honour from her mother. From then onwards she wanted to make sure that her daughters

would have honour, and respect for the family ways.

An-Mei’s daughter, Rose Hsu Jordan, has completely different views on life and

how things should be approached, than her mother does. Rose was raised completely

different environment as well. She was born and raised in The United States of America.

So she has been Americanized in a way that she doesn’t care to follow the same customs
 31
of her mother’s culture. An-Mei would tell Rose when Rose broke the news that her

marriage would soon no longer exists. An-Mei says:

“This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you

must do”. “So what can I do”. And my mother says, “You must think for

yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying”.

And then she walks out of the kitchen to let me think about this. (150)

Rose saw her mother as a hypocrite. She thought this because she was there with

her mother when her mother lost all hope and faith in god and religion. When Rose was

younger, she and her family took a trip down to the beach. Her mother requested her to

take care of her little brother, Bing. But Bing had fallen into the deep ocean and

disappeared without a trace. Rose, her family and coastal authorities searched the waters

for hours but never found him. The next morning An-Mei went to beach in search of her

lost son, but when he never showed up, she lost all hope. She gave up her religion also

because it didn’t bring her son back. So Rose realize that one can always hope for

something to get better, that just have to deal with what is in front of us. This is one of the

American concept that Rose was exposed to growing up in the States that her mother, in

her childhood. Life to Rose wasn’t about keeping honour; it was about keeping strong and

doing what it takes to make the life happy.

The novel, The Joy Luck Club, gives sympathetic explanations for attitudes and

events in the Chinese past and that may be cause for misunderstanding and hurt between

the mother and daughter. Lindo Jong in her story ‘The Red Candle’ sees her mother

seems to be cruel and rejecting. At the age of two years old, Lindo was affianced to the

Huang family’s son, which she says:

 32
My own family began treating me as if I belonged to somebody else. My

mother would say to me when the rice bowl went up to my face too many

times, “Look how much Huang Taitai’s daughter can eat”. My mother did

not treat me like this because she didn’t love me. She would say this biting

back her tongue, so she wouldn’t wish for something that was no longer

hers. (49)

The education that the mothers had received of strong self-control, keeping face in

the midst of humiliation, sacrifice for one’s families, and finding one’s worth in oneself.

The experience of war, separation from their families and poverty could not break these

mothers, but the only thing their education had not prepared them was the experience of

their daughters. This was a battle they would have a very difficult time in winning.

The mother’s unanimous feeling is one of the hopelessness in the face of their

daughters whom they could raise the way they were raised. Their confidence in the

superiority of Chinese ways and the superficiality of Americans cause them to impose, to

demand and to criticize, fearful all the while because the mothers had seen their daughters

moving farther and farther away. They do not have their experience that could have

prepared them for the attitudes they see which is embodied in their daughters. The

episode of Lindo Jong’s hateful first marriage reveals a fairy tale on how Lindo terrorize

her mother-in-law until she hurried her with money and begged to go from the house.

This memory is sacred to her and does not permit her to comprehend her daughter’s

indifference.

I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents promise. This means nothing

to you, because to you promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to

come to dinner, but if she had a headache, if she had a traffic jam, if she
 33
wants to watch a favourite movie on TV, she has no longer has a promise.

(46)

Lindo uses some superstitious ideas for her own to escape from her first husband.

This was hated by her mother and she never accuses Lindo for what she did. Instead of

blaming her daughter she blames herself for the attitude towards the family. She even

compares both Chinese character and American character, by not teaching her daughter

the Chinese character.

The mothers are afraid of everything and they thinks that something will happen

to her daughters even the mother’s absence. Lena’s mother, Ying-Ying, gives warnings to

her daughter as she feels that something will happen to her daughter at any time. While

they were walking in street Lena asks her mother about a woman sitting on the sidewalk.

Instead of telling about the woman she tells a lie to her daughter and gave warnings to

her. She says, “A man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you

have a baby. Then you’ll kill the baby. And when they find this baby in garbage can, then

what can be done? You’ll go to jail, die there”. (118).

The most important part of the daughter’s problem is adjusting to the situation of

being a Chinese-American, eating different food, speaking a different language with their

mothers. The childhoods of the daughters of The Joy Luck Club are marked by their

mother’s stories, their mother’s mystical and mysterious powers, and by ghosts of the

past. They will have to confront this past in order to come to terms with their mothers and

the relationship they have built up with their mothers. The central story of the novel is

about the story of Suyuan’s story:

Joy luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first

marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That’s why I think of Joy
 34
Luck as her Kweilin story. It was the story she would always tell me…

Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which

grew darker, casting low shadows into her life, and eventually into mine.

(9)

Throughout the book, Tan contrasts the strong domineering mother’s stories with

the daughter’s incapacity for self-definition and inability to make sense of their lives. The

daughters need a tradition to lean on, something they cannot find in their mothers because

their mothers are from another world. One group of stories concerning the daughters

features the struggle for maturity, a rather typical generational tension with the mothers.

Generally, the daughters tend to perceive cultural blanks, the absence of clear and definite

answers to the problem of the family, while the mothers often provide those kinds of

principles that seem to empower to make strong demands on their daughters.

The most important part is that the older women, mothers, are not pushing their

daughters into an outmoded or inappropriate set of values and traditions. But they do

resist on a basic cultural formulation. Lindo express a typical attitude, “I wanted my

children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character.

How could I know these two things do not mix? (308). This sounds not of compromise,

but in her reply to her daughter’s declaration, “I am my own person”. And I think, How

can she be her own person? When did I give her up? (309).

The contrast between the mother’s expectations and the daughter’s real lives is at

the central of the novel. The drama of the mothers pushing for success in the land of

opportunity and the daughter’s incapacity to do more is the core of the generational

conflict. The daughters cannot be able to understand why their mothers do thinks the way

they do by constantly hurt and placed on the defensive there seems to be no way to win.
 35
Jing-Mei, doesn’t understands her mother’s criticism was actually a form of

encouragement and explained to Suyuan:

“There is a school of thought,” I said, “that parents shouldn’t criticise

children. They should encourage instead. You know, people rise to other

people’s expectations. And when you criticize, it just means you’re

expecting failure”. “That’s the trouble,” my mother said. “You never rise.

Lazy to get up. Lazy to rise to expectations”. (23)

There is a radical difference between the mothers and daughters that separate them

and their aspirations. The older generation constantly struggles with fate that is the

circumstances in their lives that brought them to where they are, while the younger

generation perceives their main difficulty as the making of choices. It is a kind of fear that

runs through both the experience of the mothers in China, but it lacks in the lives of the

daughters, which deprives them of a paddle to direct them. In this context, The Joy Luck

club is a determination of hope in the face of constantly altering social situations and

continually shifting rules.

The mothers are aware of the differences in the circumstances surrounding

themselves and their daughters, and the daughters await the younger generation. An-Mei

fears for her daughter and says, “If she doesn’t speak, she is making a choice. If she

doesn’t try, she can lose her chance forever. 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” (257).

The daughters suffers an inevitably suffer from an inferiority complex when

placed before the mothers. Even as adults, the daughters are dominated and almost
 36
manipulated by their mothers, they cannot avoid that feeling of smallness when faced

with their mother’s superiority. This kind of feeling is expressed by Lena St. Clair:

To this day, I believe my mother has the mysterious ability to see things

before they happen. She has a Chinese saying for what she knows.

Chunwang chihan: If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold. Which

means, I suppose, one thing is always the result of another. She sees only

bad things that affect our family…I remember this ability of my mother’s,

because now she is visiting my husband and me in the house we just

bought in Woodside. And I wonder what she will see. (173-174)

The Chinese world haunted by pain and tragedy is governed by the common sense

and deep insight into human passions and frailty. There are reasons for everything which

is easily understood. In ‘Rules of the game’, reveals that the secrecy is equivalent to

hidden power. Waverly says, “A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one

should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one

must show and never tell” (102).

Revealing a motivation behind a hurtful remark leads the Chinese daughter to an

understanding and sympathy for the mother whose seeming rejection, but a self-defensive

mask for her own vulnerability and love. All Chinese mothers underwent a process of

self-affirmation, or recognition of their worth as people. For An-Mei, it was learning

about her mother’s suicide; for Lindo Jong it was the reflection of the mirror on her

wedding day:

I wiped my eyes and looked in the mirror. I was surprised at what I saw. I

had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was

strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see that
 37
no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. I threw my

head back and smiled proudly… but under the scarf I still knew who I was.

I made a promise myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes,

but I would never forget myself. (58)

The fact, Suyuan requests her daughter Jing to be obedient does not confirm with

the concept of freedom, which is highly significant. Because the construction of the

mother is through the daughter’s eyes, Suyuan, Lindo is deprived of the power to her

voice her clarification of the issue. With the power she drags her daughter to make her

learn piano and forcing her to practice. It will be beneficial to learn something about the

concept of hope for the mothers about their daughters. But later, Jing had some other

reasons to quit her practice in piano.

The daughters require autonomy, freedom and control over their lives, their

individualistic understanding of the family and the family life goes against by their

mothers. To respect their mothers they use certain words like ‘shut up’ or ‘crazy’. The

daughters never show any loyalty to their mothers. They disconnect themselves from their

mothers when they wished that their mothers are not mothers. It is a customary belief that

daughters usually tend to define themselves in connection rather than separation from the

mother, because the American-born daughters reject their mothers and never managed to

obtain a strong functioning relationship with them.

The linguistic barrier creates misunderstanding between the Chinese speaking

mothers and English speaking daughters. The vignette ‘Feathers from a Thousand Li

Away’, suggests a language gap between the mothers and daughters. It is old that an old

Chinese woman needs to wait for a long time to give her a daughter a swan feather that

she has brought with her from China. This mother wants to tell her daughter that the
 38
“feather may look worthless”, but it symbolises all the love and good intentions. In order

to get her daughter to understand her motherly love and devotion, the old Chinese mother

has to wait patiently until she is able to communicate in her daughter’s language in

English. “And she waited, year after year, for the day she could her daughter this in

perfect American English” (5).

All the mothers in the novel, like the old Chinese woman in the parable, are

transformed through certain experiences that fundamentally change their characters, such

as living in America and becoming to some degree Americanized. However, this mother-

daughter conversation about her maternal love or personal development might never take

place. Even if the mother were to learn ‘perfect American English’, she would never be

able to translate fully the difference in meaning of the story. June confesses that the

daughters think that their mothers are stupid because of their fractured English.

The mothers cannot express the evils that lie in store for her daughters, the child

stops listening to her mother and the mother loses her authority, credibility and control

over her daughter. After the mother-daughter dispute over the bike-riding, the mother in

the parable becomes silent. In the same way that Lindo and Suyuan became silent after

their conflicts with their daughters. The conflicts that took place over Waverley’s chess

and Jing’s piano lessons demonstrate their reluctance to listen. The daughter’s refusal to

listen to their mother’s advice and guidance are the reasons for many conflicts that

occurred between the Chinese mothers and American-born daughters.

The achievement of the mothers dreams for her daughter results in the alienation

of the mothers and daughters, for the daughters readily and entirely adapted to the

customs and language of the new land while the mothers still hold on to choose the old.

There is some tension in between the mothers and daughters, between old China and the
 39
new American environment. The focus is either on the mother, who figures out her world,

or on a daughter, who seems to caught in a sophisticated cultural trap, puzzling over the

realities that surround them and trying place in an ambivalent world. The daughters

cannot even confide each other and also with their mothers.

Once the daughters are aware of their mother’s vulnerability, their weaknesses,

then all danger is past and the mother may be invited in. The ultimate surrender is death.

But the death of the mother is far from being a victory for the daughter, is a tremendous

loss. Only they can discover that their mother’s vision of truth and hope is not grounded

in Chinese convention but in fierce love, which makes them to desire their daughter’s

freedom and selfhood as well as their own. They also realize that the education that they

receive served them. They stand up to husbands and even mothers, learning that

embarrassing is not a form of respect.

Jing-Mei’s final story, a paradigm for all the other daughters, lead her to China to

heal posthumously her mother’s deepest hurt and fulfil her deepest longing. Suyuan

Woo’s death and the unfulfilled hope of finding her twin daughters moves The Joy Luck

Club members to encourage Jing-Mei to finish her mother’s story for her and say to Jing:

“You must see your sisters and tell them about your mother’s death” says

Auntie Ying. “But most important, you must tell them about her life. The

mother they did not know, they must now know”… “Tell them stories she

told you, lessons she taught, what you know about her mind that has

become your mind”. (34-35)

In the final part, Jing visit China with her father to make her mother’s wish true.

She was very excited to see her half-sisters in China. They had never known that their

mother was dead three months before. At first, they had send Jing a letter, which makes
 40
the father felt a lot in his mind as they consider Jing’s mother as their true mother. When

she reached China Jing happen to hear about her mother’s attitude to save her twin

daughters:

When the road grew quiet, she tore open the lining of her dress, and stuffed

jewellery under the shirt of one baby and money under the other… And she wrote on the

back of each the names of the babies and this same message: “Please care for these babies

with the money and valuables provided. When it is safe to come, if you bring them to

Shanghai, 9 Weichang Lu, the Li family will be glad to give you a generous reward. Li

Suyuan and Wang Fuchi”. (345)

Though the mothers all have different names and individual stories, they seem

interchangeable in the role of mother take all other roles and is performed with the utmost

seriousness and determination. The mothers are so strong that they endure all manner of

pain to enforce their will to show their love for the daughters. But this love was

misunderstood and resented by all the daughters. In the Jing’s story the mother-daughter

relation is broken by the mother’s death. It was once battle becomes a devastating loss, a

loss compensated by the daughter taking the place of the mother in The Joy Luck Club.

The daughters understood about their mothers and they feel for the things that

they had done to their mothers. All mothers support their daughter’s when they are in

great trouble. They notice that they had misunderstands them in all the ways. Mothers are

possessively trying to hold fast and the daughters are battling for autonomy at the starting

point, but the daughters understands the love and hope of the mothers towards their

daughters.

Thus the novel, Joy Luck Club ends on a note of resolution and reconciliation. The

struggles between the mothers and daughters are over and the hated relationship changes
 41
into a cherished relationship. The daughters are very happy with their mothers in which

they reconcile with their own mothers and make peace with them. Thus, the old ways of

misunderstandings were cannot be incorporated into the new life of the mother-daughters

life.
 42
Chapter Four

Summation

Amy Tan is one of the prominent Chinese-American writers that have emerged

since 1980s. She is well known for her lyrically written tales of emotional conflicts

between Chinese-American mothers and daughters. Amy is famous for her books which

deal the search for self-definition and individual acceptance in American society. She also

created an awareness of the racial and cultural identity to establish their American

identity. She is a neurosurgeon who later becomes a writer, inspired by the novel Love

Medicine.

Tan’s novels are the bestselling novels of the time. Her novels are like windows,

though which the readers can see the sufferings of the Chinese immigrants in America.

The thing that strikes us most is that, in her less number of novels she focuses on the

questions of identity, gender and interaction between the older and younger generations.

She narrates the story through a child’s innocent perception and also adult’s experienced

eyes in all her books. This allows the readers to make a judgement of their own to add

their own interpretations of the mother-daughter struggle. This literary device invites

readers to think about the way memory itself functions, anyone can use events in the past

to help make sense of the present.

Tan starts with the social customs connected with the sufferings of the immigrant

people. Then she goes on the most important problem of the interaction between

generations, particularly older, Chinese-born and young, American-born generations. She

also writes about racism, sexism, culture and long standing tradition are the focal themes

in her later novels. She uses interlocking personal narratives in almost all her books

through different voices.

 43
Though Amy Tan’s novels have been praised by the critics, it has also been

alleged by Chinese-American author Frank Chin, that it perpetuates racist stereotypes.

Chin argues that Tan and other writer’s paints a world in which the Chinese-Americans

refuse to accept the “icky-gooey evil of the Chinese culture” (Saxena 93). Some critics

are particularly impressed with Tan’s ear for authentic dialogue. Other writers also

criticized along with other Chinese-American women writers for criticizing sexism and

the patriarchy of Imperial China.

Amy received Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for fiction and National book

Award for her book The Joy Luck Club. She does not see herself primarily as a Chinese-

American writer, focussing on immigrant experiences. She objects to being limited

because of her heritage. She sees herself as a writer who is a story teller, teacher and

enchanter. Her novels have a balanced structure because of Chinese value, balance and

harmony. Her books introduce characters who are uncertain, as she once was about their

Chinese background. The structure of the novel succeeds in manifesting the individual

tragedies of Chinese immigrants to America, but the difficulties of the culture changes the

immigrants to undergo transformation.

Her novel, The Joy Luck Club is no exception to this. The special thing about the

novel is that it handles a subject that is not taken place naturally. The subject matter is

obviously the problems and difficulties related to the sufferings of the mothers and

daughters. The language used in the novel is written in simple manner and it is easy to

understand the incidents that happen to the characters. The basic framework of the story

or stories arises out of collaboration between two kinds of people who are culturally

located in two different worlds, but physically living in the same surroundings. Tan had

made her best to connect the Chinese mothers and their American daughters within the

framework of her work.

 44
In the first part of the dissertation, cultural indifferences depict the cultural

background of the important characters. It comprises a series of short story like vignettes

between the lives of four Chinese women and their American daughters in California. In

the novel the characters are entangled by the cultural differences. It also presents some

beliefs and traditions or customs in Chinese tradition especially the sacrificial one. They

believe that the soup of a person’s arm flesh can cure or heal the disease of another

person of the same family.

Tan narrates the efforts of the mothers in teaching their daughters their Chinese

ancestral cultures, but the daughters are not ready to accept them. The daughters prefer

American culture in their marriage. According to the Chinese culture there is no divorce,

which is entirely opposite to American culture of marrying more than one time. The

daughters who are unable to balance among both the cultures choose the dominant

culture, American culture. The mothers are waiting with a thought, that their daughters

will understand and accept their views about their Chinese traditions and culture in the

future by their own.

In the second part, the relation between the mothers and daughters are dealt with

it. The mothers and daughters are separated by their own misunderstandings. The

daughters always need an independent life by their own rules and expectations. They

disliked their mother’s interference in their life completely. The mothers also insisting

their own interests upon their daughters in pursuing their career, but this were

misunderstood by their daughters and they dislike their mothers.

The mothers felt comfortable to speak in Chinese language. But for the sake of

their daughters they spoke in mixture of both Chinese and English, which makes English

a fractured one. The mothers want their daughters to take decisions of their own without
 45
gaining any help from others. They never allow their daughters to be alone because they

are concerned about their daughters softly due to their ignorant behaviour.

My Research paper is made on the culture and traditions of two different countries

and the difficulties faced by two different characters belonging to two different ages. The

senior characters have love towards their ancestral Chinese language, but the junior

modern characters prefer a less restricted American culture which is entirely different

opposite to their own culture. This is not only in case of two cultures or countries or

languages.

Throughout the world, people who are forced by any reason like war, profession

etc. to live in more than one culture are facing the similar problems that are faced by the

characters of this novel. Daughters are the representatives of the younger generation of

this present modern world. The inability to balance the cultural values, affects the

relationship between the mothers and daughters in this novel. They wanted an

independent life and freedom to take all decisions in their life. They are unaware of their

mothers love towards them which is not a dominating or a selfish one.

In this modern society, younger generations are expecting freedom in culture. By

this freedom of living, they are blind to consider the merits and demerits of culture. The

experienced mothers somehow managed to live in both the cultures, but the daughters

find it more difficult to live in balance. They did not even understand their culture and

their mothers. They are also departed from their mothers emotionally. The relationship

between them is worsening due to their attempts to have a free life.

At the end of the novel, the daughters are learning both the merits and demerits of

two cultures and they understand the importance of emotional and affectional relationship

between mothers and daughters. The mothers also understand that their daughters were
 46
being raised in different world. So they have to give some time for their daughters to

change. After the great effort, the daughter’s changes and they gave respect and

appreciate their mothers more. They are able to choose the right one to succeed in their

career and also to have a happy, peaceful and meaningful life.

This research is a mirror reflecting the problems and the solutions faced by the

people of any two different cultures. All cultures have their own merits and demerits. It is

in the hands of each individual to live their life in balance whatever difficulties they face

in the journey of life.

 47
Glossary

pichi - bad temper

ching ching - eat

chizle - mad to death

syaumei - a little dumpling

ni - traitor

shemma bende en tounau - What kind of fool you are

shwo buchulai - words cannot come out

mei gwansyi - It doesn’t matter

dindsying tamende shenti - take care of them

nikhan - You watch

choszle - stinks to death

chunwang chihan - If the lips are gone the teeth will be cold

nale - there

chang - necklace

shemma yisz - What meaning

nuyer - your daughter

shemma - is that you

Jrdaule - I already know this

Hulihudu - confusion

Heimongmong - dark fog

 48
waigoren - foreigners

nala - take it

swanle - finished

kechi - too polite

syaujye - miss

jyejye - sister

aiyi - auntie

jandale - grown up / big

meimei - younger sister

dong - east

lou - building

houche - train

kai gwa - open the watermelon

lihai - wild and stubborn

tyandi - heaven and earth

sz tai - fourth wife

 49
Works Cited

Primary source:

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Great Britain: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.

Secondary source:

Barker, Chris. Television, Globalisation and Cultural Identities. Buckingham: Open

University Press, 1999. 71. Print.

Guerin, Wilfred L., Earle Labour, Lee Morgan, Jeanne C. Reesman, John Willingham. A

Handbook of Critical Approaches to literature. New Delhi: New Z.A Printers,

2012. 299. Print.

Hariharan, Githa. Thousand Faces of Night. New Delhi: Penguin Group. 1992. 13. Print.

Hudson, William Henry. An Introduction to the study of English Literature. Noida(UP):

Maple Press Pvt. Ltd., 1965. 9-10. Print.

Kim, Alaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writing and their Social

Context. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1982. 438-442. Print.

Pathak, R.S. Denying the Otherness: The Fiction of Shashi Despande. New Delhi:

Creative Books, 1988. 252. Print.

Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction. 2nd ed. UK: Blackwell

Publishing Ltd., 2007. 196. Print.

Tendulkar, Vijay. Kanyadaan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. 33. Print.

Velkley, Richard. Language, Culture and Personality: Culture and Anarchy. New York:

Macmillian, 1882. 172. Print.

 50
Saxena, Anju. Role of Women in English Literature. New Delhi: Sonali Publications,

2011. 93. Print.

Web Sources:

"Mother Daughter Relationship in The Joy Luck Club." 123HelpMe.com. 24 Feb 2016

<http://www.123HelpMe.com/view.aspid=156501>.

http://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/52404.html

"Mother Daughter Relationships - The Mother-daughter Relationship in Amy Tan's The

Joy Luck Club." 123HelpMe.com. 24 Feb 2016

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