"The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the ways in which the mother-child relationship is negotiated and continually reconstructed in "The Joy Luck Club" and the endlessly complex ways in which mothers and daughters love each other and can so easily destroy each other. All of this takes place in the context of families of Chinese-Americans in California.

From the Paper:

"When political barriers began to fall in the 1970's, older emigrants welcomed the chance to end their long and agonizing exiles. But their children looked with a deep ambivalence on the idea of having to awaken a dormant Chinese side in themselves. And so, as the exterior world went about recognizing China, re-establishing diplomatic relations and initiating trade and cultural exchanges, these young Chinese-Americans found themselves wrestling with a very different and infinitely more complicated interior problem: how to recognize a country to which they were inextricably bound by heritage, but to which they had never been. For Tan's daughters, this meant coming to terms with themselves as independent of their mothers and yet inextricably a part of the same heritage."

More papers on "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan:

• Book Review # 98029 : "The Joy Luck Club"
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• Comparison Essay # 32877 : "The Joy Luck Club": Story Comparison"

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