The Joy Luck Club
Throughout the novel The Joy Luck Club, author Amy Tan conveys the message of tradition and change. This message is related through eight women that tell their separate stories, which meld into four pairs of mother-daughter relationships. The mothers, so concentrated on the cultures of their own, don't want to realize what is going on around them. They don't want to accept the fact that their daughters are growing up in a culture so different from their own. Lindo Jong, says to her daughter, Waverly- "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 has a headache, a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on T.V., she no longer has a promise."(pg42) Ying Ying St.Clair remarks- "...because I remained quiet for so long, now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid."(pg64)
The daughters, on the other hand, the other half of the inseparable pair, tell stories of how their mothers tradition, culture, and beliefs, helped them come to many realizations about themselves. These realizations are both positive and negative. Jing-Mei Woo tells the story of how her mother wanted her to be the next Shirley Temple. "My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant...You could become instantly famous.
‘Of course you can be prodigy, too," my mother told me..."you watch," and I would see Shirley [Temple] tapping her feet ,or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O..."You watch," said my mother as Shirley's eyes flooded with tears. "You already know how. Don't need talent for crying!"(pgs141-142)
Through this, and other attempts at making little Jing-Mei famous, such as cutting her hair, getting her a piano, and forcing her to play it, Jing-Mei realizes that "...unlike my mother, I did not believe that I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me."(pg154)
Rose Hsu Jordan relates the story where her mother throws a precious stone into the sea, in hopes that the "sea-monster" would give back her baby boy who had, hours earlier, fallen to his death. She offered the jewel as an offering, since the "ring of watery blue sapphire"(pg137) caused other women to gaze admiringly, and covetously upon the ring, and made them forget about the children that they were protecting, possibly the ring would make the monster forgetful of her child, and give him back. Although Lena knew this was a foolish thing to do, throw an expensive ring out into the ocean, never to have it back, she somehow sensed that it essential for her mother to throw the stone, and along with it, her last hope for her lost child.
Waverly Jong tells the story Waverly Jong takes her mother, Lindo Jong to go to a beauty salon. Waverly suggests to the ‘hip, fashionable, expensive, hard-to-book' hairdresser that she wants it dyed "not this hideous purple-black, like from a bottle, my mother does it herself." Waverly explains to the barber. Her mother replies by saying why should she have someone else do it, when she could get the same from a bottle. No one notices it. Waverly glares at her mother. Although Waverly has many problems with her mother, another, from the first half of the book was her mothers foolish pride. Lindo walks the street with Life magazine, flattened on her chest, proudly displaying to anyone within eye and earshot that her daughter won because she told her to win with her horse. Waverly can't take this anymore, she screams "Why don't you play chess!"(pg101)Her mother looks at her, astonished. While in the middle of the staring match with her mother, where she could sense the magnitude of emotions her mother was feeling, she runs, in fear of what she might have done, gone against her mother and what she had been taught. The culture clash had begun.
Yet, through all of this, Waverly realizes that her mother, and the slightest thing her mother says or does against her, or what she wants to do, affects her. She cries-"You have complete control over me." In the salon, they admire each other in the mirror, their two faces becoming the same face, as they realize they are the same person. They have learned massive amounts from each other. Lindo strives to make her daughter the best by criticizing her, while Waverly strives to be the best through being ‘perfect'. However, in the end, mother and daughter end up meeting each other halfway, and become one.
Lena StClair, in one of her vignettes explains how her mother could predict things. One day, her mother predicted who her husband would be by looking into her rice bowl. "My mother had looked into my rice bowl and told me I would marry a bad man." (Pg164)
"‘Aii, Lena,' she had said after that dinner so many years ago, ‘your future husband have one pock mark for every rice you not finish.'"(pg164)
"...And I thought of a mean neighbor boy who had tiny pits in his cheeks the size of rice grains."(pg164) Then, Lena views a film in her school about the starving in Africa, and she realizes what she must do. "After seeing this film, I did a terrible thing. I saw what I had to do so I would not have to marry Arnold (the pock mark boy). I began to leave more rice in my bowl. And then I extended my prodigal ways beyond Chinese food. I did not finish my creamed corn, broccoli, Rice Krispies, or peanut butter sandwiches. And once, when I bit into a candy bar and saw how lumpy it was, how full of secret dark spots and creamy goo, I sacrificed that as well."
Lena's mother didn't realize what she was doing at the time, most likely just a mother trying to make her daughter eat more of her food, yet, it produced the opposite effect. Lena became anorexic after this incident, and after learning that Arnold, the pock mark boy had died of measles, she ate an entire gallon of ice cream and the promptly retches it all back up. She wonders "...why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good."(pg 167) This ends Lena's anorexia, and bonds her with her mother in an even stronger manner, after her mother finds her shivering, on the fire escape with the box of ice cream.
Yet, in the book, daughters can produce positive and negative effects upon their mothers as well. In one of the aforementioned cases, such as the one with Waverly and her mother, Waverly's mother, Lindo doesn't understand why Waverly is treating her like a child.
Lena St.Clair's mother doesn't understand why, if her daughter knew something was going to happen, why let it?
An-Mei Hsu doesn't understand why her daughter is going to a psychologist. Why go to someone, when you can try to make your marriage work?
All of these stories are strung together by the story of Jing-Mei Woo, and her mother's story of the loss of her babies during a war in China. How the loss of her babies equaled the loss of all her hope. How when Jing-Mei was born, her hope transferred to her, and the hope never died. The hope that Jing-Mei would be happy, and have a good heart. In the story Best Quality, as written from Jing-Mei's perspective, Jing-Mei looks on the food plate, and gives the best of the food to her mother, and leaves the rest, the worst quality food, for herself. Her mother refuses the food, and gives it to Jing-Mei. Before this , Waverly had taken the best crab for her daughter, and the second best for herself. After dinner, Jing-Mei's mother takes her aside and tells her that she has the best quality heart, and that is the best quality. This is why she is so proud of Jing Mei. Shortly after this, Jing-Mei's mother dies, and leaves her a seat in the Joy Luck Club. During one of the gatherings of the Club, the rest of the original members of the Club inform Jing-Mei that she needs to go to China. Her mothers babies have been found, and the story comes full circle as she finally sees them, sees a part of her mother, and all three, as they come together, are their mother.
This thread through the book, is the one that, no matter what, family is always the most important thing, and the bond between mothers and daughters is the strongest bond that there is, because everything a daughter learns is from her mother, and all the values have been broken up so finely, that sometimes the children come out differently, and, in the endthey teach their mothers valuable lessons.