Bonds Between Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club Essay

Bonds Between Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club A good mother-daughter relationship is beneficial for both the mother and the daughter. This definitely comes into play in Amy Tan’s novel titled â€Å"The Joy Luck Club.† The story is about four sets of Chinese mothers and daughters, and their first experience of growing in America. All of the mothers want to raise their children in the traditional Chinese way and still allow them to be all that they can be in America. This causes many conflicts between them when the daughters act too American and the mothers act too Chinese. There are also problems when some of the daughters grow and get married to American Men. The mothers influence the daughters with stories of ancestors and eventually the daughters learn that their mothers really do know what they are talking about. Each mother shows their love to their daughter in a different way, and the daughters usually respond to it in a negative manner. There is a lack of communication between the mothers and daughters, which leave a lot of open space for assuming. The daughters seem to inherit a lot of their mother’s characteristics as they get older without even meaning to. In some cases they appear to mirror their mothers. It is as if everything that they have fought against for many years has become them. The Joy Luck Club is a club that one of the mothers, Suyuan Woo started to gather four Chinese women together to raise their spirits. They would meet each week, rotating each lady as a host, eat and talk about things that were going on in each woman’s life. They would play mah jong to raise money incase something came up that they needed emergency money for. Suyuan had twin girls when she lived in China but had to l... ...and that the vase was going to break and she knew that the marriage was going to fall apart if she didn‘t do something. As you can see, each of the mother-daughter couples has a lot in common. They share the same feelings, similar experiences, and a lot of the same knowledge. As rights activist James Baldwin once said, â€Å"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.† Even if some of the daughters fight their mothers to get along together, it ends up it is for the best. Strong mother-daughter bonds are shown through out the novel and many lessons are learned by the daughters. Each daughter makes her mother proud and in the end that is all that is important. The mothers are just happy that they raised their daughters right. WORKS CITED    Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Random House, 1989.