Mother-daughter relationships are often complex. In “The Joy Luck Club,” author Amy Tan expresses the mother-daughter relationship through four women and their daughters who migrate to America from China. The women were in search of better lives then what they had in China. The mothers and their daughters did not always see eye to eye but at the end the daughters started to realize that their mothers just wanted the best for them. As the daughters are growing up, the conflict between them increases.
Suyuan Woo started the “Joy Luck Club” when she left China. She started the club as an escape that her and the other women experienced. When Suyuan was in China she had twin girls but had to leave them behind, she got remarried and raised a daughter, Jing-Mei in America. Suyuan and her daughter Jing-Mei shared a special bond that many didn’t understand. She would tell her daughter different stories about her twins, but Jing-Mei never knew if her mother was telling the truth.
“I never thought my mother’s Kweilin story was anything but a Chinese fairy tale. The ending always changed,” Jing-Mei would say (Pg. 25). Jing-Mei soon finds out that the stories her mother been telling are real, they were stories of her life. The more she learned about her mother past stories from China she started to have respect for her mother. Once she started facing challenges of her own, she is able to take her mom advice into consideration.
Jing-Mei wanted to find her own identity without her mother and still please her but all Suyuan wanted was her daughter to be a genius. Suyuan wanted nothing but the best for her daughter, she hoped that one day Jing-Mei would become a phenomenal pianist. Even though Jing-Mei played the piano, she never thought she was good enough for her mother’s standard so she never gave it her all. However, she stops playing the piano “I could only be me,” (pg.154). She couldn’t be true to herself; she couldn’t live up …
Joy Luck Club Essay Mother Daughter Relationships. (2019, Nov 27). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/paper-on-mothers-and-daughters-in-the-joy-luck-club/