The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
I chose Amy Tan because I am familiar with her writing and I like her style. It is interesting to
know about the Chinese culture. Amy Tan’s style of writing in The Joy Luck Club uses flashbacking and
multiple points of view to see every person’s feelings and thoughts, instead of having it be interpreted
through the eyes of only one character. My definition of style is how an author chooses to write her
book to reach out and connect to the reader. Amy Tan uses deep emotion and sad stories to make a
psychological connection to the readers. The title of the book, The Joy Luck Club, is the name of a group
of women who came to America and shared hopes and difficult pasts with one another. They come
together to be able to bond and they develop a deep connection with one another because they are all
haunted by their pasts.
The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan, is a story of four mothers and their daughters, as each of
them try to find themselves and discover what it is to truly achieve the American Dream.
When the critic Roland Barthes said, “Literature is the question minus the answer”, this is what
the Joy Luck Club had done to connect to the reader. This story takes place in San Francisco, where four
women with an inner strength had met in church. They had all come to America in hopes of achieving
the American Dream, and be able to raise their children in a better environment. The fears of their pasts
had caused them to escape to a safer America, where their children did not have to face the horrors that
their mothers had in the past. The Joy Luck Club consists of four women and their four daughters, and
each of them has their own story to tell. Amy Tan raises the question of what it really means to be
“successful” in life and each of the women have different ideas on prosperity. The mothers, who were
the original members of the Joy Luck Club, all share the same fear of having their daughters grow up too
fast. They had been raised to learn to count blessings and be respectful to their elders. When they had
come to America, it had been a huge culture shock to them. With open arms, they embrace America in
hopes of being a successful person in the country. Their only goal in life, as they move to America, is to
secure a good and happy life for their daughters. Their daughters, in their eyes, have forgotten what it
means to be Chinese, so they try and share themselves and their pasts to teach their daughters morals
and values needed to live and learn from life.
The mothers all came to America to be Chinese in an American home life. Their daughters are
raised in an American environment, which is what their mothers had wanted. However, the daughters
learn to push away and forget about their heritage and the values their mothers teach them. This
change in their values distances each family’s relationship between mother and daughter, and each of
the mothers have their own stories to share to try and rekindle the lost relationship with their
daughters. Because of their difference in values, the daughters do not see what the mothers see, and
think that the achievement of the American Dream is to get a good job and make a lot of money.
However, the Joy Luck Club members see past this, and realize that to achieve the American Dream, one
must also be happy and open. The daughters struggle to find themselves as they walk the line between
Chinese and American. They all have made money and are successful in the materialistic sense, but they
are not truly happy, because some suffer marriage problems while others try to make their mother act
more “American”. Their mothers try to reach out to them and make them realize being successful in life
is not based on the money that she makes, but making decisions she will not regret later in life.
Each member of the Joy Luck Club had a horror-filled past that they have to retell to their
daughters. This is the only way they know how to bring back the open and loving daughter they had
before she was consumed in American culture. While one mother suffered from an arranged marriage
she learned to escape from with her inner strength, another mother had to sacrifice her love for her
twin daughters so they could continue living while she went off to die. These experiences that the
mothers went through have shaped who they are today, and it is crucial to them that their daughters
have the knowledge and ability to make their own decisions that will help them prosper in life. The
members of the Joy luck Club have already achieved the American Dream by coming to America and
raising their children in a safer environment, but they also want to ensure that their daughters can grow
up to be as wise as they are. Amy Tan uses different points of view in the book, and the battle between
American and traditional Chinese values.
Amy Tan uses her multiple points of view to create a psychological fight of daughter and mother
as they strive to understand one another, and more importantly, understand themselves. She leaves the
audience to answer the question for themselves. What does it mean to be successful in life? And who in
the book has really found their inner peace and understanding?