History, Culture and Identity of Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s The

History, Culture and Identity of Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tans The Joy caboodle Club Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club is a novel that deals with many controversial issues. These issues unfold in her stories about four Chinese captures and their American raised daughters. The novel begins with the mothers talking about their own childhoods and the relationship that they had with their mothers. Then it focuses on the daughters and how they were raised, then to the daughters current lives, and finally bottom to the mothers who finish their stories. Tan uses these mother-daughter relationships to describe conflicts of history, culture, and identity and how each of these themes are intertwined with one another through the mothers and daughters. The mothers and daughters not only experience a generation gap, tho since the mothers were born in China and the daughters were born in America, they also experience a certain cultural gap. This leads to miscommunication and misunderstanding on both parts. To the mothers, their Chinese inheritance is very meaningful to them and the Americanized daughters dont always understand this. The daughters get embarrassed by their mothers broken English. For instance, at one point Lindo Jong says But in spite of appearance I am becoming ashamed. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am knightly of her, and I am her mother and she is not proud of me. (pg. 291). Lindo is hurt because her daughter Waverly, is talking to her like she is a child. Waverly does not do this on purpose, she just has a hard time understanding her mother and her background, like the other daughters in the book. Living with their traditional culture in American society, Chinese-American women suffer the prob... ...ying to save their daughters from the cultural barriers, and identity crisis that they had to face. It is in listening to these stories that the daughters find their legitimate identities and become the people that they r eally are. They realize that they do not have to look at their mothers as their opponents, but instead their equals. They accept and even celebrate the fact that they are the same as their mothers. The Joy Luck Club tells a strong and powerful story that shows the importance of history, culture, and identity in mother daughter relationships, and also in everyday life. Works CitedDo, Thuan Thi. Chinese-American Women in American Culture. 1992 http//www.ics.uci.edu/tdo/ea/chinese.html Jokinen, Anniina. Anniinas Amy Tan Page. 1996 http//www.luminarium.org/contemporary/amytan/ Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York Random House, 1989.