destipele's Full Review: Amy Tan - The Joy Luck Club
The structure of the book, The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan is very interesting and very much facilities the universality of the novel. An important key to the Joy Luck Club is its tying in of each families' story. The north, south, east, and west of the mah jong table are inseparable. Amy Tan connects them with the structure of the book. The organization of chapters and episodes, as well as the broad short passages preceding every one of the four sections, emphasizes the universality of each joy luck family situation.
Four sections divide the novel. Each section represents a stage in either the experience of immigration or in the mother/daughter relationships of the families. The first section, Feathers from a Thousand Li Away, tells the story of each mother back in China. The vignette that opens the book about the swan feather foreshadows the mother’s hardships and dreams of the United States and the daughter’s lack of understanding for what her mother went through. The mother attempts to bring a swan, a bird that turned out to be more than what it was supposed to be, to symbolize what each person could be, but when the swan is taken away and the mother is left with only a feather, she fears her daughter will never understand. “[Suyann]and [Jing-Mei] never really understood one another. [They] translated each other’s meanings and [Jing-Mei] seemed to hear less than what was said, while [her] mother heard more,” (Tan 27). This is a microcosm of the entire book and the roadblocks that keep one generation from understanding the next.
With this short passage, Tan sets up the pattern of events to follow. Also, opening the novel with their stories of sacrifice prepares the reader to understand the mothers' motives later. We are a bit more forgiving at their criticisms and demands than are their daughters. This opening section sets up the tragedies of each of its mothers. An-Mei’s scar from her childhood had healed. “That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain,” (Tan 40). This describes a lot of the situations of the women in the opening section. The pain they experienced in the novel was in their past, and they tried to forget it , but the mark that it left could never go away , and so they often repeated things on their daughters. Due to the structure of the book, and the various voices in which it is told, the reader can see that.
The Twenty Six Malignant Gates are stories of the daughters and how they are hurt in their childhood. The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates is a chinese book that described all the bad things that could happen to innocent children. This title foreshadows the impending tragedies that the daughters will also face in their lives. And the fact that
An-Mei tried to prevent all of them for her daughter and all of her children, shows the way all of the mothers attempted to safeguard against their daughters becoming too much like themselves. The opening passage describes a mother forbidding her daughter to ride around the corner because she will get hurt. The young girl protests and "jump[s] on her
bicycle, and in her hurry to get away, she [falls] before she even reach[s] the corner" (Tan 87). The passage foreshadows the troubled lives of the daughters and how they can't comprehend what their mothers expect of them. Each daughter rebels. Waverly quits chess to hurt her mother, but hurts herself instead. Rose says she has no choice in divorce. Jing-Mei won't learn piano, but "after seeing [her] mother's disappointed face
once again, something inside of [her begins] to die" (Tan 144). This too mimic the lack of understanding between the generations.
The next section is ironically titled American Translation. The daughters are an American translation of their mothers. Ying-ying St. Clair describes her daughter at one point as being so “thin now you cannot see her...She like a ghost, disappear,” (Tan 177). This is much the way she describes herself in later chapters, as a Tiger who has lost it’s orange and black, and has allowed itself to become domesticated somehow. Ying-ying perhaps sees in her daughter herself, and how she allowed herself to submit, so when she finds that her daughter is paying for ice cream she doesn’t eat in her husband with Harold, she wants Lena to stand up for herself and gain her voice again. All of the daughters are struggling, now as adults, to come to terms with their mothers as fellow adults and their seemingly secret knowledge. June realizes "[Her mother’s friends] are frightened. In [herself], [the other mothers] see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America" (Tan 31). Again, the conflict of an immigrant mother and American child is played out. We see that the hopes the mothers had for their daughters haven’t fallen into place like they would have liked, and this new generation have also failed to become what the mothers themselves could not be.
The final section, Queen Mother of the Western Skies, brings the stories full circle. The life stories are finished by the mothers. They are stories of lost innocence. The mothers see themselves in the daughters. An-Mei notes of her daughter at one point,“I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.” A sense of completion ends the novel; each mother will help each daughter re-balance their lives.
Important to the structure is the placement of each of the four sections, also representing the north, south, east and west. Note that Suyuan Woo’s chapter is first and she was also the east at the Joy Luck Club, the place where things begin. Her daughter’s chapter of meeting the twin daughters that she could never meet, also concludes the book, and this too is a beginning. It is a beginning for Jing-Mei because she realizes that she is like her mother, and after seeing her sisters, can come to terms with her heritage and the loss of her mother. The chapters read mother, daughter, daughter, mother. It is a framed novel, ending with the same set narrators as the beginning. By separating the stories, it never causes too much of a bias. Of course there is a temporary sympathy to the
current narrator, but underlying that is an understanding of the preceding narrator.
It might be assumed that there would be a tendency to think of the mothers as one person because their situations are so similar. However, each character has her own personality, even though the organization groups them together. This simply emphasizes that coming to America is a singular process, and not everyone does it the same way. And it makes the universality of the message much more pronounced. The reader sees the way mother/daughter relationship patterns often happen, and it makes the reader wonder exactly how much her own mother might know.
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