Mother-Daughter Communication in Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club Essay

Mother-Daughter Communication in Amy Tans The Joy parcel Club Of the m any stories involving the many characters of The Joy Luck Club, I hope the central theme connecting them all is the inability of the mothers and their daughters to communicate effectively. The mothers all have stories of past struggles and hard times yet do not believe their daughters truly appreciate this fact. The mothers of the story all want their daughters to never have to go through the struggles they themselves had to go through, yet they are disappointed when their daughters grow up and do not exhibit the respect or strength of their mothers. This is the ironic paradox of the story. The Chinese mothers came to the United States to escape the difficult life they led in China and to start fresh in the United States. They did not want their children to grow up as they had. The short story in the beginning of the nurse describes this feeling. Then the woman and the be adrift sailed across an ocean ma ny thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan In America I give have a daughter just like me. But oer there nobody will say her worth is measured by the speciousness of her husbands belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan - a creature that became more than what was hoped for. Even though this is just a short story before the long one begins and is not actually attributed to any specific character in the story, I believe it accurately describes all the mothers feelings a... ...tionships in Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen Gods Wife. Women of Color Mother Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Austin U of Texas P, 1996. 207-27. Ghymn, Ester Mikyung. Images of Asian American Women by As ian American Women Writers. Vol. 1. New York Peter Lang, 1995. Heung, Marina. Daughter-Text/Mother-Text Matrilineage in Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club. Feminist Studies (Fall 1993) 597-616. Huntley, E. D. Amy Tan A Critical Companion. Westport Greenwood P, 1998. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York Pergamon, 1990. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Vintage Contemporaries. New York A Division of Random House, Inc. 1993. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. recitation Asian American Literature From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton Princeton UP, 1993