Mother-daughter Relationships in The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

As complex as they may be, Tan’s novel pays particular attention to the special connection between mothers and daughters being extremely valued and powerful. For instance, after An-mei’s mother attempts to save Popo by adding her own flesh to a Chinese soup, An-mei realizes, “This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones” (Tan 48). From the relationship displayed between An-Mei’s mother and grandmother, she realizes that the connection is still strong even though Popo forbade her from coming back home and An-Mei from talking about her. Tan illustrates how no matter the countless differences and troubles a daughter and mother may have, deep down, mothers still love and care for their daughters and daughters to mothers. Moreover, Born of a Stranger, published in 2009, by Gloria Shen, describes the novel’s mother-daughter relationships, through the illustration:

Though the mothers all have different names and individual stories, they seem interchangeable in that they all have similar personalities — strong, determined, and endowed with mysterious power — and that they all show similar concerns about their daughters’ welfare. As a result, the mothers are possessively trying to hold onto their daughters, and the daughters are battling to get away from their mothers. (Shen)

Essentially, Tan describes how the mothers’ lives, though different, all develop similar mindsets and convey their love through their life stories to help their daughters understand the meaning of their actions. The mothers want to keep their daughters close and teach them lessons from their own Chinese upbringing, but the daughters strive to be independent from their mothers. Furthermore, after the mothers find out that Jing-Mei never really knew her mother, she realizes, “They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English… They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation”. The mothers see their own daughters reflected in Jing-mei and realize how little she knew about her own mother’s past and realize the relationships with their daughters are the same and their stories need to be told. Their individual decisions to tell the stories and their secrets and histories, is their last attempt to bridge the gap between cultures, languages and generations and restore the mother and daughter relationship. In conclusion, through their life stories of wisdom and sacrifices, Tan demonstrates the deep, valuable bond between a mother and daughter.

An-Mei Hsu reveals more about her complex relationships with her mother and daughter through the wisdom passed down from generations to generations. After An-Mei’s mother put her flesh in the soup, she advised, “You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her”. An-mei says that her daughter must metaphorically peel off her own skin to see the love and influence of her mother beneath. All mothers and daughters are connected, and daughters need to honor that. But they also need to discover their individual strength separate from their mothers. Additionally, in the article, “An-Mei Hsu”, Catherine Romagnolo describes how even though An-Mei feels she is unsuccessful in raising her daughter the opposite way she was brought up, “Rose comes to better understand herself and her own desires by listening to her mother’s wisdom, and in the end, she is able to extricate herself from a loveless marriage” (Romagnolo). Basically, although An-Mei believes that she failed to raise her daughter, Rose comes to the realization of what she truly needs with the help of her mother. Ultimately, Tan presents An-Mei Hsu with great sagacity given from previous generations and her attempt to pass it on to the next to continue and build upon her mother-daughter relationship.

Tan uses jewelry and pieces of a chessboard to illustrate a deeper meaning behind the mothers’ and daughters’ lives and mindsets. For example, almost all the mothers grew up in poor families without excessive luxuries, so the jewelry illustrates a mother’s love for her daughter; after a Chinese New Year feast, Jing-Mei recalls, “my mother gave me my ‘life’s importance,’ a jade pendant on a gold chain…the whole effect looked wrong: too large, too green, too garishly ornate. I stuffed the necklace in my lacquer box and forgot about it”. Jing-Mei did not understand the jade necklace in the same way she did not understand her mother until later in life. After her mom passed away, she thinks about how her mother was the only person that could tell her about life’s importance and grief. The jade was given to Jing-Mei to not only provide a sense of positivity and protection, but it also expresses and reveals Suyuan’s love for her daughter. In addition, as Waverly lays down on her bed after finally returning home from an argument with her mother earlier that day, she imagines, “Her mother’s black men advanced across the plane, slowly menacing to each successive level as a single unit. My white pieces screamed as they scurried and fell off the board one by one”. When it comes to her relationship with her mother, the black and white chessboard pieces symbolize Waverly’s black-and-white way of thinking, for she associates her criticism with bitterness, even though that is not what Lindo Jong ultimately intends. Overall, through everyday objects, the novel displays a more meaningful understanding of the thoughts of the women.

Out of the numerous people who immigrate to America, many end up not achieving that goal they desired. Tan reveals irony through Jing-Mei Woo and her mother, Suyuan Woo. After losing everything in China and coming to America, Suyuan believed that anyone, including her daughter, could become extremely successful: “You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. Suyuan believes in the hope of being and doing anything imaginable in the new country. Even though America is known as a land of new beginnings and fresh starts, her hopes are later diminished, for she later discovers that it is not as easy as she believes it to be. Suyuan loves her daughter and wants the absolute best for her such as encouraging her to become a “Chinese Shirley Temple” or a piano prodigy by sending her to a beauty training school and taking piano classes, but ultimately Jing-Mei describes, “I didn’t get straight As. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college”. Jing-Mei spends much of her childhood practicing to become a person her mother can be proud of, but in the end, despite all the time and effort put into classes and training, Jing-Mei falls short and believes that she is a disappointment and failure to her mother. Even though her daughter did not succeed in what she had planned, she still loved and supported her. To conclude, Suyuan’s hopes for her daughter in the new land play out in a more negative way than what she had imagined like many other immigrants.

Although separated by cultural and generational dissimilarity, Tan displays the power and value of the connection between mothers and daughters through the characterization of the women using the symbolism of jewelry and chess, and the irony of American dreams. No matter the mother-daughter troubles, a complicated, broken relationship is still a relationship that can, in time, reconnect or flourish into a greater bond.

Works Cited

1. Chen, T. (1994). Women and culture in Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club". MELUS, 19(4), 5-18.
2. Gan, L. (1997). Immigrant identity in The Joy Luck Club. Women's Studies, 26(2), 117-134.
3. Ghosh, S. (2003). The power struggle in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. The Atlantic Literary Review, 4(2), 50-60.
4. King-Kok Cheung, A. (1991). An analysis of the mother-daughter relationship in "The Joy Luck Club". College Literature, 18(3), 161-175.
5. Ling, A. (1998). "Chinese-ness" in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club: language, identity, and misrecognition. PMLA, 113(1), 90-102.
6. Romagnolo, C. (2010). An-Mei Hsu. In C. Howard (Ed.), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature (pp. 347-349). Greenwood Press.
7. Shen, G. (2009). Born of a stranger: mother-daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club. MELUS, 34(2), 33-51.
8. Tan, A. (1989). The Joy Luck Club. G.P. Putnam's Sons.
9. Teng, E. (1993). Liminality and the Asian American identity in The Joy Luck Club. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 34(2), 83-95.
10. Wong, H. K. (1995). The matrilineal discourse of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 28(3), 85-102.