Jing-Mei and Suyuan Woo

Book Review # 104967

Asian Studies > Asian American
English > Analysis
Literature > American

An analysis of the development of the characters Jing-Mei and Suyuan Woo from Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club".

1,485 words () | 1 source | MLA | 2006 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how in "The Joy Luck Club", Jing-Mei Woo is the narrator who opens and closes the novel. While she is only one of four young women whose stories make up the novel, the placement of her story makes her seem to be the major character, especially because her stories strongly build up the theme and plot of the entire book. It also examines how Suyuan and her daughter are perfect portrayals of mother daughter relationships and how their roles throughout the novel and relationship set the main purpose of the novel.

From the Paper:

"Jing-Mei is representative in other ways as well. She believes that her mother's steady criticism states a lack of affection, when in fact her mother's harshness and high demands are her expressions of faith and love in her daughter. All of the other mother-daughter pairs experience the same misunderstanding, which may be seen to come from cultural differences. What Tan portrays as the traditional Chinese values of obedience, criticism-masked expressions of love, and the disguise of too many emotions all clash with the daughters' American ideas about independence, free speech, and self-worth. However, by ultimately creating a bridge between China and America, between mothers and daughters, Jing-mei ultimately reunites some of these cultural and family age differences, providing hope for the other mother-daughter pairs."