61 pages • 2 hours read
Amy TanThe Joy Luck Club
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Bridging a Cultural Divide
Each of the sections of the novel opens with a story of a Chinese woman with an American-born daughter in a different stage of life. Like the woman in these stories, the mothers fail to communicate with their daughters. Because the daughters speak little Chinese and the mothers speak limited English, they must “translate” what they hear, which fails to include the subtleties and inner meanings inherent to language. Miscommunication and misunderstandings result and often cause hurt feelings.
The mothers and daughters are separated by difference of culture, meaning customs, traditions, social constructs, and ways of thinking. The mothers grew up in a much more socially stratified country with strong emphasis on familial ties. The daughters grew up in a more socially mobile country with emphasis on individuality. This sets them up for clashes in what is desirable behavior with inevitable anger and resentment on both sides.
This is a classic immigrant dilemma: The mothers want their daughters to have greater opportunities in America and to be free to make their own life choices, but when faced with the reality of how this looks, they become distressed. They want daughters who have “American opportunities, but Chinese values.” While their daughters are young, this seems impossible. With their fear of maternal disapproval, the daughters are not overly rebellious, yet they often internalize the struggles to reconcile their own desires with their mothers’ expectations. Nevertheless, as the daughters grow older, their mothers come to see that they have indeed learned to incorporate their mothers’ life lessons into their actions and personalities.
The daughters eschew their mothers’ insistence that the Chinese way is the best way, yet all four mothers are exceptional, norm-breaking examples of Chinese women who combat expectations of how a woman should live her life. They all left China, a radical act in and of itself. Yet their daughters often do not understand this and believe that their mothers are examples of traditional thinking and behavior.
Storytelling
Throughout the novel, the mothers try to impart life lessons to their daughters by telling stories, using both their own life events and parables. This echoes the way the mothers learned about life themselves, through stories told by their mothers, grandmothers, and domestic servants. Thus, this tradition of passing on wisdom through storytelling feels natural to the mothers.
To the daughters, especially when they were younger, these stories seem like superstitious fairytales with no applicable meaning to their lives. The daughters’ yearning for directness clashes with the roundabout, implied meanings behind the stories. A tale about a water god and lost ghosts seems as superstitious a lesson as “Don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back.” The daughters would much prefer a straight warning about why it’s unsafe to walk alone instead of a litany of warnings about the terrible fates that befell the children in The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates.
However, as they grow older, the daughters come to recognize the value of these stories more. The tales still feature overly extreme situations with supernatural elements, but the daughters learn to glean the true meanings better and they have a greater appreciation for how their mothers are trying to help them through their life challenges. When they truly listen to the stories, the daughters learn from them.
Storytelling is also the mothers’ way of passing down Chinese heritage to their daughters. The stories often feature past ancestors, giving the daughters some sense of the family that came before them. The mothers have no photos to share, no records to show their daughters the families they left behind. All the mothers have to give their daughters a sense of connection to past generations are stories.
Destiny Versus Free Will
Part of the dichotomy between the book’s depiction of the perceived difference between Chinese and American ways of thinking involves fatalism versus free will. Fatalism is the belief that all life events are predetermined and cannot be changed by human action, so what happens in one’s life is inevitable. Free will is the concept that humans have the power to control their life events, which are not determined by prior causes.
What is interesting about this story is that the Chinese mothers, who were taught that their lives were controlled by fate, actively work to improve their lives. For example, Lindo rejects her arranged marriage and manipulates her way out. Suyuan refuses to wallow in sorrow and creates the Joy Luck Club. Conversely, the American-born daughters often struggle to take charge of their own lives. For example, Lena cannot stand up for herself in her marriage, and Rose believes she has no agency when her husband wants to dictate the terms of their divorce.
This theme demonstrates how there are no absolutes for those who bridge two cultures. The mothers, by virtue of the fact that they already were rebels when they left China, are predisposed to accepting free will is a part of their life experience. The daughters, who absorbed belief in fate through their mothers’ lessons, come to understand that their family history impacts how they behave.
Maternal Sacrifice
In telling their life stories, the older women often exhibit reverence for their own mothers. This is part of their impatience with their daughters, who they feel routinely fail to show them comparable respect. In the case of An-Mei, her appreciation for her mother stems from the fact that her mother gave the ultimate sacrifice, her very life, in order to secure a future for her daughter.
All the mothers make sacrifices that are unappreciated when their daughters are young. They have to adjust to a country in which they have little status and have to struggle financially as well as personally. For example, Suyuan takes the menial job of housecleaning in order to acquire a piano for Jing-Mei. The mothers have an immigrant mentality, in which sacrifices are viewed as worthwhile in order for later generations to have better opportunities.
The daughters grow up not understanding the sacrifices their mothers have made for their sake. They see their mothers as “cheap” because they don’t want to spend money on material items, not understanding that their mothers grew up in much more luxurious conditions. The daughters fail to understand how hard it is to find work and to succeed when one doesn’t speak English well. They don’t understand that their mothers’ constant criticism hides extreme pride for their daughters’ accomplishments and pain due to their unhappiness. Part of the book’s arc is that as the daughters grow older, they come to understand how much their mothers sacrificed for them.
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