Chinese Mothers and their American Daughters in Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club :: Joy Luck Club Essays

Chinese Mothers and their American Daughters in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club â€Å"â€Å"No choice! No choice!† She doesn’t know. 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. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.† (Tan 241) In desperation, mother An-Mei Hsu describes her frustration over her own mother-daughter relationship in Amy Tan?s The JoyLuck Club. Four Chinese born mothers and their four American born daughters tell stories from their own point of view about their relationships with one another: mother-mother, mother-daughter, and daughter-daughter. The way these stories weave in and out of the past and present, and how these women?s lives unfolded tell much of what women are taught to think of themselves, and how it shapes their lives. How a mother hopes to give her daughter strength, respect for herself, and a bond between mother and daughter, as told by the mothers, is reflected back by how each daughter processes what she perceives her mothers? lessons to be. All of the mothers came to America to escape the horrors of war. They hoped for the prosperity and ease that living in the United States would afford them. With them they brought the sacred teachings of Taoism and Confucianism. Peter Tavernise defines these ancient traditions in "Fasting of the Heart: Mother-Tradition and Sacred Systems in Amy Tan?s The Joy Luck Club." Jing-mei describes her limited understanding of these concepts as, ?The elements were from my mother?s own version of organic chemistry.? (Tan 19) Tavernise states, ?Just as in the Confucian ritual system, very little of the mother-tradition in the text is told explicitly from mother to daughter: ritual actions are supposed to be observed, absorbed, read, and understood in order to be transformed, preserved and handed down in turn.