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| The Joy Luck Club (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Asian, Portuguese, Same Thing?:
How Mother’s Love Their Daughters in
Mysterious Ways.
The Joy Luck Club takes the reader on a
journey to discover many different aspects of what family life is like for a
first generation Americans through the mother daughter relationship. These
experiences are not just limited to Asian Americans however, and could be
considered true for immigrants from other countries as well. This book
resonates with the author, who is a first generation American with family
coming over from Portugal in the early 1970s. Amy Tan describes the mother
daughter relationship with acute accuracy, and in that relationship one finds a
strong matriarchal familial obligation hidden below the surface.
Communication
between the mother and daughter in the stories that compose The Joy Luck Club is nil. Both parties hid
their true selves from each other via lack of communication. On the part of the
mother, and a common theme for all the mothers in the the story, she does not
share the trials and tribulations she had once endured in China. The mother
keeps this information from the daughter in order to shield and protect her.
The daughter in return cannot understand what life was like in China first hand
and when growing in an American society, she easily and unknowingly takes her
mother’s struggles for granted. The daughter is sympathized with at first
because the mother is incapable of understanding the complex feelings of the
daughter who is lost in two different cultures. According to Souris, “The
Chinese woman is full of good intentions and hopes for that daughter. But her
relationship with her daughter is characterized by distance and lack of
communication”. It is not until the story of the mother is told that she is
finally sympathized with. The mother, at first seems cruel in her actions or or
intentions for her daughter, until we learn later that there are very good
reasons for the mother’s actions.
Coincidently,
it is in this behavior that we are able to discover the mother’s true obligation
and intentions for her daughter. Even if the mother’s idea of motivating the
daughter could be viewed as abuse to others. For instance, this author was
repeatedly called “fat” by her own mother, who had the intention to keep an eye
on her daughter’s weight and teach her daughter self control. This caused the
daughter to grow up to develop Body Dismorphic Disorder, a cause for much
anxiety. However, today, if the mother is asked about her tactics or this
disorder she would surely state: “But she isn’t fat” in that she was successful
in her endeavor. Asian culture also uses shaming as a form of motivation to accomplish
a certain goal in an act of negative reinforcement. The author understands from
personal experience that the Portuguese culture partake in this act of shaming
as well. Souris states that, “Without knowing this, it is more likely that the
shaming behavior some of the mothers of The Joy Luck Club engage in to control
their children will result in a reading that blames those mothers for
inappropriate behavior. As a consequence of the misunderstanding, such a reader
would not grant those mothers the sympathy for which they qualify.” To many,
this type of behavior could be viewed as abusive, however in the mother
daughter relationship that is present in Tan’s work, the reader eventually
comes to realize the mother’s motives. It is through the mother’s motives that
one is able to see that she treats her daughter this way out of love. The
reader discovers that something has happened during the mother’s past, the
mother does not want that same future for her daughter and will at all costs
act to prevent history from repeating itself.
Perhaps,
the reader of The Joy Luck Club finds
that the mother daughter relationships present in Tan’s work are like those of
their own as well and not just limited to first generation Americans. Of
course, everyone only has their own experiences to go by, but Wood states “The Joy Luck Club is important because the text resists an essential
representation of "authentic origin," or an essential notion of what
it means to be Chinese”. It is the belief of the author that
although written from a Chinese American point of view the mother’s present
here are not just Chinese mothers and could very well be Portuguese mother’s as
well.
In
conclusion, one will find a very strong relationship between mother and
daughter in The Joy Luck Club, even
if that relationship is hidden under a layer of disdain, the strength and
respect still remain on part of the daughter and a strong familial obligation
on the part of the mother. Amy Tan should be commended for her work of
identifying and describing the mother daughter relationship so potently and
perfectly.
Works
Cited
Souris,
Stephen. "Only Two Kinds of Daughters": Inter-Monologue Dialogicity
in the Joy Luck Club." MELUS 19.2 (1994): 99. ProQuest. 25 Feb. 2016.
Wood, Michelle Gaffner.
"Negotiating the Geography of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan's
the Joy Luck Club." The Midwest
Quarterly 54.1 (2012): 82,96,10. ProQuest. 25 Feb. 2016.
