The Damages of Parental Expectations in 'The Joy Luck Club' by Amy Tan

Trials...errors...disappointment. Many adolescents fail to keep up with their parents’ expectations and as a result often distort their own reality. The book The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989 by Amy Tan, takes place around the 1980s. The setting alternates between San Francisco and China. The novel focuses on four Chinese immigrant mothers, who experience complications raising their Asian-American daughters. They eventually gain a better understanding about their identity and their family members. This creates a sense of unity between each mother-daughter relationship. Tan strongly demonstrates her theme, of how parental expectations affect their children; by using the serpentine mother-daughter relationship issues, miscommunications between each other, and mental obstacles each pair faces.

Unquestionably, the human society is known for sharing many kinships, in the novel The Joy Luck Club, it presents relevant issues each mother-daughter pair faces within their relationship. An issue that is most significant is between Waverly Jong and Lindo Jong. As a child Waverly won many chess tournaments. Her mother was extremely prideful and always wanted to show Waverly off much to the greatest extent possible. Her mother expected her to be the most exceptional and exceed her previous scores compared to her last tournaments. Because of this, Waverly feels ashamed and expresses her feelings to her mother. This provoked Lindo to lash out at her daughter, causing Waverly to run away to a dark, empty alley. Before running away, Waverly conveys, “why do you have to use me you show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn how to play chess?” (Tan 101). This act of defiance from Waverly demonstrates the tension between her and her mother. To further explain, Waverly stands up for herself because she wanted to be her own person. She felt as if her mother was taking all the credit, and was overbearing. This further complicates their relationship, and with the addition of her mother’s expectations, Waverly could no longer suppress her true feelings. Another instance, of a complex relationship between a mother and daughter, is seen in June Woo’s point of view. Shortly after her mother's death, June takes her mother’s position at the mahjong table. She conversates with her aunties and discovers that her twin sisters from China reached out for contact. She is informed by An-mei that her Chinese sisters want her to visit them in China. June feels hesitant to visit them and tell them about her mother’s death. She tells her aunties, “what will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don't know anything” (Tan 31). This quote shows that June and Suyuan Woo had a very distant relationship. Because her mother kept changing her story of immigration, June doesn’t feel connected with her mother and often queries whether she really knew about her mother after her death. Additionally, with her mother’s expectations this causes their convoluted relationship to be even more tense than before, as shown in the novel. But because of these complex relationships the mother-daughter pairs strengthen their bond with each other.

Throughout the novel, the four daughters misapprehended their mother’s expectations. Growing up, Lena always had to interpret what her Chinese mother was saying, and oftentimes found herself lying to others about what her mother said to protect their feelings. She believed that her mother had a secret, mysterious ability to predict the future before it happens. Later in the story, Lena experiences issues in her marriage with Harold and is too afraid to reveal these issues to her mother. Even though her mother could clearly spot the instability in her marriage she passively tries to help Lena fix it. As Lena gave her mother a brief tour of her new house, her mother was constantly pointing out mistakes. Lena had an intuitive perception,

She can see all this. And it annoys me that all she sees are the bad parts. But then I look around and see everything she’s said is true. And this convinces me she can see what else is going on, between Harold and me. She knows what is going to happen to us, (Tan 164).

This quote shows how Lena loses herself because of her mother’s expectations. These expectations causes Lena to constantly overthink about how her mother would perceive her which damages her self esteem and confidence. This conflict affects her marriage as well because it results in her failure to take initiative in her unhappy relationship with Harold. In addition since her mother, Ying-ying, grew up with influences of old traditional Chinese culture about fate; she is constantly moving furniture and pointing out imperfections to prevent wicked omens from occurring. To Lena, this denotes that her mother doesn’t approve of her or her new house with Harold. Even though her mother's intention was to foster Lena’s growth and try to assist her in life, Lena deems this as mistreatment. This “mistreatment” that Lena sees, causes her to lose rationality of what her mother’s intentions were for her. She is no longer able to grasp the bigger meaning behind her mother’s protection through the belief of fate and omens. Futherfore, The Psychology of Expectations articulates that “human beings have a natural tendency to pin their hopes for happiness on fulfilled expectations,” (Johnson 1). The issue with expecting certain actions from others can lead to disappointment. Because Lena feels a tremendous amount of pressure to be perfect in front of her mother, she associates the feeling of happiness with satisfying her mother. By doing this she views herself as a failure whenever it seems as if her mother doesn’t approve of Lena’s decisions or actions. This causes her to feel morally indignant towards her mother which makes her unable to realize that her mother is trying to warn her about her toxic marriage. Although the daughters in The Joy Luck Club misinterpreted their mother’s expectations, they ended up discovering the deeper meaning behind their mother’s protection and tender care through these expectations.

Additionally, Amy Tan demonstrates her theme through the mental adversities each mother-daughter pair face. Throughout the story, Suyuan Woo had superlative expectations for her daughter, June. June’s mother tells her that she will one day grow up to be a child prodigy. Because Suyuan Woo spent her job cleaning houses, she collected magazines and read about exceptional children. This inspired Suyuan Woo, who then tried to achieve this by testing her daughter’s ability in many areas of expertise like finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, predicting temperature, or even the capability to recall certain information from memory. This embedded an unrealistic expectation in June, which later can be seen in the story to affect her mentality. After failing many of her mother’s tests, “and after seeing my mother’s disappointed face once again, something inside of me began to die,” (Tan 144). In the quote, when it refers to ‘something inside of June dying’ it applies to June’s hopes of becoming perfect in her mother’s eyes and pleasing her. Since June felt the need to be an ideal, faultless daughter she felt ashamed of herself for appearing like a despondency in her mother’s perspective. To further explain this topic, in the article, When Parental Expectations Do More Harm Than Good it states, “children become fearful of making mistakes when their parents expect them to be perfect,” (Health enews 1). Reasonably, a certain amount of pressure would be healthy for a child’s success. But, in June and Suyuan Woo’s case the amount of pressure June experienced was extremely overbearing on her, which affected her emotionally. Because she was extremely dependent on how her mother viewed her she pushed herself and felt dissatisfied when she couldn’t meet both her mother and her own expectations. Through these mental challenges the Chinese-American daughters gain better insight of their worth in life.

Unrealistically high expectations of a parent is bound to affect their children, whether they know it or not. All of the mother-daughter pairs in Joy Luck Club experienced strains in their relationship, misapprehension of each other’s form of family affection, and mentally challenged each other in a negative way. The determination these four mothers had for each of their Asian-American daughters led to many adversaries, which took time and effort to resolve. The significance of parental expectations is that although it may be healthy to give children expectations, the amount of pressure may wreck the child physically and mentally, as shown in the novel. But even at the lowest point these daughters, in the story, came to a realization that these expectations shaped their identity today.