The Joy Luck Club 4 Essay, Research Paper

The Joy Luck Club

The Joy luck club was a book written by Amy Tan. The story is set here in America and in China and is set in the 1940 s and also takes place now. The book is about four Asian women who fled china and their Americanized daughters.

There are eight main characters four of which were mothers and four of which were daughters. They were Suyuan Woo, Ying-yang St. Clair, An-mei Hsu, and Lindo Jong, who were the mothers, and the daughters Jing-mei Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, Lena St. Clair. In the book it tells the story of each of the mothers and what they went through from the eyes of their daughters.

The book mostly focuses on Jing-mei Woo, who takes the place of her mother in the Joy Luck Club meetings after the death of her mother. In the meetings with the other mothers she reminisced about her mother and heard new stories about her mother she had never heard before. She hears stories of how it was her mother came to America and what she left behind in China.

The book starts off in China with a woman imagining what life in America raising a daughter would be like. Hoping that she would be an American but still have her Chinese heritage. But in the end her daughter turns out to be as Americanized as they come not realizing her Chinese heritage. This makes it so that they don t communicate very well and makes it so they don t know very much about each other.

This book shows that now days the traditions of the older generations are slowly being filtered out by the younger generations. An example in the book is when one of the mothers had her marriage pre-arranged by her parents and a friend of the family and the fact that she accepted the marriage. The difference between the mother and daughter was that the daughter was married multiple times against what her mother believed in and to people who her mother wouldn t have approved of. This shows that the children had lost some of their heritage because of where they were raised and the influence that the different cultures would have on them.