The Joy Luck Club, Section 1: "The Joy Luck Club"

Literary Term: Motivation

*To the left is a picture of Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club.

In “The Joy Luck Club,” which is the first section of the novel The Joy Luck Club, the material that seems most likely to draw a response from the reader is the idea of a mother-daughter relationship. The exploration of this complex bond between a mother and her daughter is clearly one of the most prominent themes of The Joy Luck Club, and as such, the first section of the book appropriately sets the stage for the remainder of the novel by immediately examining the relationship between Suyuan Woo and her daughter, Jing-mei. After conducting a small amount of research on the author of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan, I discovered that many similarities exist between Amy Tan and Jing-mei. For example, Tan was born in California to Baptist Chinese immigrants, just as the character Jing-mei was. Also, both Tan and Jing-mei had mothers who were forced to leave their daughters from a previous marriage behind in China. These undeniable connections reveal that the author has poured many of her own feelings, experiences, and perhaps insecurities into the pages of this novel; consequently, the book’s content is saturated with many highly personal thoughts and emotions. The Joy Luck Club, therefore, renders a strong connection to general culture and will surely speak to all mothers and daughters who read this intriguing story.

A literary term which was evident in this first section of The Joy Luck Club is motivation, which can be defined as a character’s incentive for behaving or acting in a particular manner. Jing-mei, who has taken her mother’s place at Joy Luck meetings since her mother’s death, is asked by her aunties to travel to Hong Kong and meet her mother’s two daughters from her previous marriage. Jing-mei has never met these two women or even contemplated the idea of having two half-sisters; therefore, she was surely reluctant to grant this wish of her late mother and her friends. Jing-mei quickly realizes, however, how indispensable this journey was to her mother, as well as how desperate her mother’s friends are for her to share tales of Suyuan with her sisters. As a result, Jing-mei draws her motivation to travel to Hong Kong and meet her sisters from this plea from her aunties.

One quote in particular that carries much thought and meaning in this section is when Jing-mei, who is speaking of her mother’s friends says, “In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America… they see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds “joy luck” is not a word, it does not exist.” This quote showcases the fear of An-mei, Ying-Ying, and Lin that, just as Jing-mei confesses that she knows so little about who her mother actually was, their daughters will, in turn, know little of their own dreams and ideals. Also, while the phrase “joy luck” carries invaluable hope for the elderly Chinese women, to their English-speaking daughters, “joy luck” is merely a nonsense phrase that holds no meaning. This misunderstanding of a simple phrase embodies the boundaries that differing cultures can set on a mother-daughter relationship. Even so, ignorance of the American daughters seems to exceed the factor of differing cultures in limiting the bond between these mothers and daughters. As The Joy Luck Club continues, the exploration of mother-daughter relationships will surely unfold even more.

**Visit http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tan0bio-1 for more information on Amy Tan.