The Joy Luck Club: Mothers and Daughters and the Cultural Divide - Term Paper Example

Running Head: CRITICAL REVIEW ANALYSIS The Joy Luck Club: Mothers and daughters and the cultural divide. The Joy Luck Club: Mothers and daughters andthe cultural divide. This bird, boasted the market vender, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look - it is too beautiful to eat! (Tan, 2006, p. 17) Introduction In beautiful prose and a richly detailed cultural tapestry of writing, Amy Tan discusses the lives of four Chinese women who escaped China in the 1940’s. In a prelude to her book, she writes a parable about a swan that a woman tried to bring into the United States after her escape from China, but the immigration officials took it from her, leaving her only a feather to remember and pass to her daughter. This touching story symbolizes the abstraction of culture as it is passed from parent to child when the family has become meshed into another society that does not carry the same sociological elements that influenced the home culture. All that is left is a glimmer of the origins from where their values and ethics had held their foundation. Through examining five different critical reviews, the substance of this novel will be analyzed for its rich ethnic content. The lives of the four women whose stories are highlighted enrich a story that is first of women, then of the cultural influences that created their personal stories. Their stories reveal the gap between themselves and their daughters, children who have grown up in a very different world than that from which their mothers came. The Joy Luck Club, first published in 1989, represents a door that was open into American literature to female Asian writers by the 1976 publication of Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior. The Joy Luck Club sold 275,000 hard-cover copies and widened the door for Asian female fiction so that within two years, four more Chinese American writers had books published that were selling very well (Cliffnotes, 2010). The initial setting of the book is within a social group called The Joy Luck Club, a group of four women who play mahjong. The book was made into a movie in 1993 starring an ensemble cast of some of the finest Asian actresses in Hollywood. Mother/Daughter Relationships Gloria Shen (2009), in her critical review of The Joy Luck Club, discusses the theme of mother/daughter relationships within the novel. In examining the relationships between the women, she focuses on the narrative style, stating that the narration is not one story, but is divided into sixteen individual stories that are told from the point of view of those characters that each story represents. According to Shen, this narrative style is more conventionally associated with novels from the 19th and 20th centuries, giving the work a contemporary nostalgic style (p. 3). The exception to this point of view style is the story that is told about Suyuan Woo, who has died before the novel begins. Shen (2009) compares the Tan’s style of narrative to that of music with multiple movements. The stories all have similar, overlapping themes, but are tinged with differences that create overtones that make them unique. She states that the narrative expresses “powerful bonds between mother and daughter, between generations, (which is) maybe illuminated through a montage effect on the reader” (p. 4). The fragmentary nature of the narrative is an expression of postmodernism with the narrative paradigm rejecting traditions of unity within the story (Shen 2009, p. 4). In this way, the story is able to express the different cultural points of view, switching from each highlighted character to the next, giving the reader a sense of the history and heritage that influenced the experiences that are related. Shen (2009) calls the narrative a “a collection of intricate and haunting memories couched in carefully wrought stories” (p. 5). In this way, the stories are able to create a cohesive narrative that is more concerned with the emotional context of the cultural experiences that are woven between the generations. The overall themes become the unified plot of the story, rather than an individualized and specified single narration. Shen (2009) states that Tan presents both an outline and a detailed study of each of the characters, allowing the universal tension between mothers and daughters to come through, relating the story to women of any culture (p. 6). The relationship between mothers and daughters is always a tension between the expectations of one cultural experience within a certain time and place, put into contrast with another culture within a certain time and place. This is true, even, of women who grow up in the same town, under the same roof, and within the same cultural framework. Time changes a culture as it passes, creating influences that will affect the daughter differently than the mother. When those differences are created through distances of geography, the effect is more profound. As Tan expresses these differences through contrasting the narratives of the daughters against those of the mother, she also expresses the universality of this dynamic. Despite the universality of the relational dynamics, the specific details of the experiences that the mothers lived create a richly interwoven tale of the influential social factors that create the female perspective of women who were young during the 1940’s in China. The cultural experience is not limited to only those criteria, but the mutual experience of being a member of a group of women who lived through that time period and then escaped to the United States. According to Schien (2004), “we can think of culture as the accumulated shared learning of a given group, covering behavioral, emotional, and cognitive elements of that group’s member’s total psychological functioning “(p. 17). The four mothers belonged to a specific group of women that had lived during a specified time period within China and then escaped to live within the United States. The daughters, too, were part of a specific cultural group. All were women who had been born to women who had been born in China and lived through those similar experiences. Therefore, their uniqueness could be framed by having been brought up with women whose cultural identities had begun in a society that was very different than the social experiences within the United States. Shen (2009) discusses the use of symbols and images to relate the relationships of the mothers and daughters within the universal context, but gives specificity to the narrative through her story of the swan in the prologue (p. 7). The story of the swan symbolizes the attempt of a woman to bring the beautiful parts of her culture into her new country, but has most of it taken from her. Despite her efforts to pass it on to her daughter, it is only a memory and represented by the single feather that does not truly give the picture of the whole. The structure of the narrative, with its complexities and nuance, is symbolic in itself of the complexity of the relationships between mothers and daughters. The message comes through that it is just never as simple as it might appear. The ways in which the daughters are raised reflect experiences and self made promises that the mothers never had fully revealed to their daughters. Thus, the gap in communication and understanding of one another begins to close through revelation. An example of this can be found in the character of An-mei Hsu, who was determined to raise a strong daughter who does not have to suffer from the oppression that her own upbringing had wrought. She says “And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it was because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I am a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.” (Tan, 2006, p 215). While Lowe (2004) criticizes Tan for her universalized theme of mother/daughter relationships, suggesting that she has made them fit into the context of the “broader social shifts of Chinese immigration formation” (p. 78), she also suggests that she has captured the cultural divide between the point of view of the mothers in comparison to that of the daughters. In one example, she reveals the mother’s point of view as her daughter takes her to a hair salon, believing that she has done so because she is ashamed of her mother’s looks. The daughter, on the other hand, believes she is treating her mother to a good experience. The mother, Lindo, says “I smile. I use my American face. That’s the face that Americans think is Chinese, the one they cannot understand” (Tan, 2006, p. 255). The fact that it is Waverly, her daughter, who does not understand her face speaks volumes about the cultural divide that exists between mother and daughter. Lindo’s ‘American face’ is described by a language that denotes her Americanized version of her identity which has been imposed upon her true identity that was formed through her life in China. The gaps between herself and her daughter is not only defined by their relationship as mother and daughter, but by her ethnic and cultural identity as it is in conflict with the culture of her adopted country of residence. Waverly, on the other hand, has the culture of her birth and is therefore disconnected from an understanding of her mother’s point of view. It is clear that they do not really understand one another. Language Barriers One of the ways in which the mother/daughter relationships within the book are unique to the universality of the mother/daughter relationship is through the language barriers that exist between them due to the mother’s having been born and raised in China, while the daughters were born and raised within the United States. Therefore, the English that is spoken by the mothers is often broken, leaving the daughters with the impression that the mothers are less intelligent and what they might have to say to them has no value (Shen, 2009, p. 10). However, this is symbolic of the relationship between the mothers and daughters rather than tangibly the issue that creates the gaps between them. Shen states that “Furthermore, when mother and daughter share neither the same realm of experience and knowledge, nor the same concerns, their differences are not marked by the slip of a tongue or the lack of linguistic adroitness or even by a generational gap, but rather by a deep geographical and cultural cleft” (p. 10). The language barrier exists, not due to the inability of the of the generations to communicate because of a lack of linguistic learning, but because the experiences that created the mothers represent an “otherness” to the daughters that they cannot reconcile. One of the daughters states that “My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said while my mother heard more” (Tan, 2006, p. 37). Souris (1994) discusses what he calls “active intermingling of perspectives across utterances” (p. 100). The reader becomes involved in the dialogue as he or she much assess the texts as they are laid together, one cultural point of view woven into the next, creating an overall sense of the theme of the gaps that exist between the “language“, meaning the context rather than the content, spoken by the mothers in comparison to the “language” spoken by the mothers. Souris (1994) suggests that because the reading of the book is an experience of immersion within the context of the ethnic and cultural diversions and overlaps, the text cannot be comprehended for the whole of its content, but is fragmented so that the language of the book becomes more than the writing, the truth of the communication being found within the gaps between one narrative to the next (p. 102). This is the same way in which the relationships between the mother and daughters is both understood and misunderstood. The language barrier is symbolic of the cultural barriers and the lack of understanding that each generation has for the other. The gaps are represented when the fortune cookie fortunes are read aloud, first in English, then in Chinese translation. Tan (2006) writes “Money is the root of all evil.” And then in Chinese: “Money is a bad influence. You become restless and rob graves” (p. 262). This section underlies the communication problems, that what is said does not translate into something that has meaning, not in the way it is intended. The language barrier, while real, is not the root of the miscommunication, but the barrier that exists in understanding the true meaning. Souris (1994) uses the example of Ying-ying to more fully explain the gaps in understanding that exists. She is described within the book as shrinking every year, hard of hearing, and generally as someone who is strange and to be taken cautiously. However, as her story is revealed, it sets up the explanation for why she is the way that she has become. Souris (1994) explains that through understanding what the woman has experienced, the reader comes to understand what her family does not understand, thus setting the context of understanding for its purposeful revelations that explain behaviors that are sometimes dismissed between mothers and daughters. Foster (2009) discusses the language of voice as it is translated as perspective (p. 17). The voice of the narrators of the stories has a language that has been developed through the influences of ethnicity and culture. According to Foster (2009) who quotes Belensky (1997), says that “Women repeatedly used the metaphor of voice to depict their intellectual and ethical development” (p. 18). The ’voice’ of the mothers and of the daughters is developed through the perspective from which they have experienced life, infused with the value and belief systems of their childhood and their respective cultural adaptations. The language barriers that exist are rife with the colorings of the vast differences between the cultural values and beliefs, despite the ethnicity that they have passed to their daughters. Foster (2009) says that “Until Tan’s women connect as mothers and daughters, they experience strong feelings of isolation, a sense of disenfranchisement, and fragmentation (p. 17). The fragmentation of the narrative reflects the essence of the women as they still have not reconciled their pasts, both the mothers and the daughters, with their relationships. Foster (2009) discusses a story from Amy Tan about the exotic nature of a photograph of her female ancestors (p. 17). There is a general feeling of ’otherness’ that can be viewed within the photograph. The way in which the women are dressed, how they represent themselves, and the strangeness of the geographic local, was strange and foreign to Tan when she looked at the photograph as a child. Within that strangeness, she recognized that the women were speaking to her, telling her their stories and just waiting to be heard. Therefore, language can be heard through many different filters, understood or misunderstood because of the many ways in which it is translated. For the women in Tan’s novel, it is the translation that is faulty until a deeper meaning is given to the lives of the mothers through revelations about their past experiences. The point of view of the daughters that their mothers have little valuable information is transformed through the closing of the gaps between them. Thus, the understanding of the courses of their lives for all generations clarifies, the cobwebs of misinterpretations cleared away so that the context of their experiences becomes revealed. Connectivity Singer (2009) suggests that “By connecting the previously separated past and present, Tan does not simply provide a narrative and emotional resolution for her novel - she also brings its fabricated past, and its Orientalized portrait of Chinese identity, into continuity with the novel’s more realistically delineated present” (p. 105). Once again, the relationship between the reader and the work is made clear as the “readers themselves play a role in reuniting Tan’s ideological and structural disjunctions”(Singer, 2009, p. 105). As the reader brings the meanings of the various narratives into focus and blends them to gain the contextual meaning, the mothers and daughters within the story become connected by a thread that travels through their cultural experiences, connecting them through the point of view of their ethnicity. Jing-mei’s trip to China provides a physical connection between the Americanized culture of the daughters to the geographical culture of their mothers. However, while providing a connection to her ancestral heritage, she observes that the China that her mother had described has been changed and infused with Westernization, thus symbolic of her own multi-cultural representation of a woman of Chinese ethnic heritage raised within the United States. Singer (2009) states that “China becomes a site of both historic specificity and ahistorical heritage, a fitting final destination for a book that trades on the powers of both history and myth” (p. 104). While the event of Jing-mei’s trip provides a physical connection between the cultures of the mothers and daughters, it serves to remind the reader that the myths of the past, despite the real consequences to those who hold them, are the substance of history, revised to construct the story of someone’s life. In other words, what is remembered from the past is only a memory, no longer existing in this world and lost within the stories that make up the lives of those who lived within it. They cannot be recaptured or recreated. Families are connected by those memories, but they are the myths of history, accurate and inaccurate, and only as meaningful as the meaning that has been derived from the experiences. Conclusion Lowe (2004) states that “Joy Luck Club can be said to pose the dichotomy of nativism and assimilation by multiplying the figure of generational conflict and themetizing the privatized trope of the mother-daughter relationship” (p. 80). The ethnic origins of the characters bind them together in a way that holds them close, but they are resistant to those bonds by the nature of their cultural and generational gaps that divide their understanding of one another. The daughters do not see the struggles that their mothers experienced in creating an Americanized version of themselves, but only view them for the gaps that exist because of their generational differences. The mothers, on the other hand, see their daughters for how different they are culturally, despite their ethnic ties. The point of view of the mothers is clear, where the daughters relate to their mothers without an understanding of the difference between culture and ethnicity. The are assuming they are the same because of their ethnic ties, but that their mothers don’t have a clear understanding of them, where it is the daughters who do not have the clear understanding of their mothers. Amy Tan has created a complex narrative that carries within it themes that can be relatable on a universal level, as well as themes that are relatable to specific cultural experiences. The differences between ethnic ties to one’s heritage and cultural ties can be understood through the experiences of the daughters who are ethnically Chinese, when they learn what it was for their mothers to be culturally Chinese. The formative events that their mothers describe and how it connected them to their new home within the American culture helps to close the gaps between the experiences of mothers and daughters growing up in different worlds. When Jing-mei finally connects the remembered experiences and myths of her family, she finds that her own culture has been infused into the cultural landscape of present day China. The mystery that was her mother’s past is lost, but the strands of those histories exist within the relationship that she had with her mother, rather than in her exposure to the land from which she came. References Belenky, M. F. (1997). Womens ways of knowing: The development of self, voice, and mind. New York: BasicBooks. Cliffnotes. (2010). About the joy luck club. Wiley Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/The-Joy-Luck-Club-About-The-Joy- Luck-Club.id-39,pageNum-4.html Foster, M. M B. (2009). Voice mind, self: Mother-daughter relationships in Amy Tan’s the joy luck club and the kitchen god’s wife. In H. Bloom (Ed.) Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club. (pp. 17-35). New York: Blooms Literary Criticism. IMDB. (2010). The joy luck club. Retrieved from 2010 at http://www.imdb.c om/title/tt0107282/ Lowe, L. (2004). Immigrant acts: On Asian American cultural politics. Durham [u.a.: Duke Univ. Press. Schein, E. H. (2004). Organizational culture and leadership, third edition. The Jossey-Bass business & management series. San Francisco, Calif: Jossey-Bass. Shen, G. (2009).Born of a stranger: Mother-daughter relationships and storytelling in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. In H. Bloom (Ed.) Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club. (pp. 3-15). New York: Blooms Literary Criticism. Singer, M. (2009). Moving forward to reach the past: The dialogics of time in Amy Tan’s the Joy luck club. In H. Bloom (Ed.) Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club. (pp. 83-108). New York: Blooms Literary Criticism. Souris, S. (Summer 1994). “Only two kinds of daughters” Inter-monologue dialogicity in the joy luck club. Melus. 19(2), pp. 99-123. Tan, A. (2006). The joy luck club. London: Penguin books. Read More