LITERATURE ANALYSIS #1

1.  The Joy Luck by Amy Tan compares the relationship between Chinese immigrants and their mothers in China to the relationship between these Chinese immigrants and their American-born daughters.  The novel is divided into seven different perspectives: four Chinese American daughters and three Chinese mothers.  The anecdotes of both the past and the present of each of these characters fulfills that authors purpose of describing and demonstrating the similarities and differences between those two distinct relationships.

Jing-mei Woo (Daughter)

                Jing-mei Woo is the daughter of the late Suyuan Woo.  In the beginning of the novel, she takes her mother’s place at the fourth corner of a mah jong table during a Joy Luck Club meeting.  It is during a game of mah jong that her mother’s friends, An-mei, Lindo, and Ying-ying, reveal to her that the twins Suyuan abandoned in China because of times of hardship were still alive and wanted to meet Jing-mei’s mother.  They convinced Jing-mei to go to China to meet them instead.

                When Jing-mei was a little girl, her mother wanted her to be a prodigy in something, and the only activity Jing-mei could get away with was playing the piano because her teacher was deaf.  She ended up embarrassing her mother at a talent show by playing badly. 

                Another flashback describes the superstitions of Chinese culture when her mother wouldn’t buy or eat a crab with a missing leg at a New Year’s dinner.  After the crab dinner, however, her mother gave her a jade pendant and said it was Jing-mei’s life importance.

                In the end of the novel, Jing-mei travels to China and meets her half-sisters.  She doesn’t understand what it means for her to be Chinese until she meets these family members, and they all already feel connected to one another because they reflect their mother.

Suyuan Woo (Mother)

                Suyuan married an army officer, and while she was in an impoverished refugee city, she came up with the concept of the Joy Luck Club in China so that the members could take a day from their miserable lives to actually live.  When the Japanese attacked, Suyuan left with her baby twin daughters and walked for miles to find a safe city.  Along the way, she had to leave the daughters on the side of the road because she felt that there was more hope that they would be found and taken care of than there was that they would survive another day’s journey.  She never stopped looking for them in the years before her death, and one of her friends located them just after her death.

An-mei Hsu (Mother)

                An-mei’s mother was forced into becoming a concubine to a wealthy man after her husband died.  An-mei lived with her mother for a short time in this wealthy man’s large house, after living with her aunt and uncle as a child.  A son that her mother had with the man was taken by one of the other wives to care for.  Her mother poisoned herself to escape her miserable life, and An-mei was raised by the wealthy man who wanted to please her mother’s spirit.

Rose Hsu Jordan (Daughter)

                When Rose was fourteen, her mother told her to watch her four little brothers at a family trip to the beach.  When the three older brothers were fighting, her mother told her to break up their fight, and as a result, she took her eyes off of her youngest brother who fell off of the reef and into the ocean.  They never found his body.

                As an adult, she went through a divorce with a husband who was cheating on her.  She finally followed her mother’s advice and decided to fight for the house, instead of giving it all away to her husband.

Lindo Jong (Mother)

                Lindo Jong was committed to an arranged marriage in China when she was two and married to the suitor when she was sixteen.  She escaped from that dreadful marriage through a cunning plot that took advantage of the Chinese reverence to their ancestors.  By lying about a dream where the ancestors disapproved of her marriage, she was free to travel to America years later.  There, she worked in a fortune cookie factory, and took the advice of someone in China to marry a man and have an anchor baby.  She was Suyuan Woo’s best friend, but the two friends competed against each other with their daughters’ accomplishments, Jing-mei and Waverly.

Waverly Jong (Daughter)

                When Waverly was a little girl, she was a chess champion.  One day, she became embarrassed at how her mother wouldn’t stop telling others about her accomplishments and taking the credit for them, so she took a break from chess and couldn’t win one tournament when she started playing again.

                As an adult, she had a daughter named Shoshana with her first husband who she later divorced, and then she worked up the courage to tell her mother that she was engaged to a man named Rich Shields.  Waverly is resistant to embrace her Chinese heritage.

Ying-ying St. Clair (Mother)

               When she was a little girl, she fell into a river during the Moon Festival in China, and she was lost for most of the night.  She wished to the Moon Lady to be found, and in the morning her family found her.  Her childhood innocence was crushed, though, because she found the person who played the Moon Lady in a skit, only she was actually a he.

                She grew up in a wealthy family, and was forced to marry a man who left her pregnant a couple of months later to pursue an opera singer.  She had an abortion, and she went to work as a shop attendant in a poorer district.  There, she met Mr. St. Clair, and she went with him to America to get married.

                She had Lena, and then she gave birth a few years later to a stillborn son.  She showed Chinese superstition once again in the book when she claimed that her son didn’t survive because the house was slanted so he fell out of her womb too quickly.

Lena St. Clair (Daughter)

                Lena St. Clair grew up listening to a fighting mother and daughter on the other side of her bedroom wall every night.  She also didn’t eat all of her rice, and so she was told that she would have a bad husband.

                She married a man named Harold, and they split the cost of everything that they bought and shared.  Eventually, she decided to leave the marriage, after her mother enlightened her to how miserable she actually was in that marriage.  Lena’s mother didn’t want her daughter to experience the same kind of marriage she had experienced when she was young.

 

2.  The theme of the novel is the divergence of Chinese and American cultures over generations of Chinese-American families resulting in a Chinese culture that is only present in elders.  Throughout the book, the mothers' perspectives often comment on how Americanized their daughters are.  Lindo Jong once states, "I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character.  How could I know these two things do not mix?"  This statement is the perfect reflection of this theme.

 

3.  The author's tone is reflective and nostalgic.  The reflective tone results from the constant storytelling by the characters of their past tragedies or accomplishments, and from the way she writes the character's thoughts such as, "Yet today I can remember a time when I ran and shouted," (Page 64) or "But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning." (Page 83)  I believe the author has a nostalgic tone because she seems to be reflecting her mistakes and former beliefs through the daughters that she characterized in the novel.  This came to mind because her biography says that her parents immigrated from China before she was born in Oakland, California.

4.  Imagery- "The same turquoise couch shaped in a semicircle of nubby tweed.  The colonial end tables made out of heavy maple.  A lamp of fake cracked porcelain.  Only the scroll-length calendar, free from the Bank of Canton, changes every year." (Page 16)
"I see a short bent woman in her seventies, with a heavy bosom and thin, shapeless legs.  She has the flattened soft fingertips of an old woman." (Page 19)
Historical Allusion/Extended Metaphor for the civil war in China that resulted in a communist government: "But they can do something else.  Now they no longer have to swallow their own tears or suffer the taunts of magpies.  I know this because I read this news in a magazine from China.  It said that for thousands of years birds had been tormenting peasants...when the people stood up, the birds would fly down and drink the tears and eat the seeds...But one day, all these tired peasants...they gathered in fields everywhere...they began to clap their hands, and bang sticks on pots and pans...and all these birds rose in the air, alaramed and confused by this new anger...waiting for the noise to stop...And this continued...until all those birds...fluttered to the ground, dead and still, until not one bird remained in the sky."  (Page 273)
Repetition to emphasize the importance of the subject the character is addressing:  "Something was always missing.  Something always needed improving.  Something was not in balance."  (Page 19)
"They see their own daughters...they see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese...they see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters...they see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hop passed from generation to generation." (Page 31)
Rhetorical Questions to provide a better sense of the natural thought process in someone's mind:  "Even if I had not wanted to marry, where would I go live instead? Even though I was as strong as a horse, how could I run away?"  (Page 51)
"What would your psychiatrist say if I told him that I shouted for joy when I read that this had happened?"  (Page 273)
"Why did I marry this man?"  (Page 278)
Similes allow the reader to picture concepts in a new way:  "Its walls close in like a coffin."  (Page 275)
"All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way."  (Page 241)
"It is like looking into a bowl and finding the last grains of rice you did not finish."  (Page 280)
Metaphor:  "I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water."  (Page 64)
Hyperbole:  "And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me."  (Page 64)
Dialect to demonstrate the broken English of the mothers and the difference between their fluency in the Chinese language and their fluency in the English language:  "You a smart girl.  You watch us, do the same.  Help us stack the tiles and make four walls."  (Page 23)
"Aii-ya, Mrs. Emerson good lady."  (Page 24)
Irony when Waverly's fiancée has good intentions, but they backfire:  "But the worst was when Rich criticized my mother's cooking, and he didn't even know what he had done.  As is the Chinese cook's custom, my mother always made disparaging remarks about her own cooking...'Ai! This dish not salty enough, no flavor,' she complained, after tasting a small bite...This was our family's cue to eat some and proclaim it the best she had ever made.  But before we could do so, Rich said, 'You know, all it needs is a little soy sauce.' And he proceeded to pour a riverful of the salty black stuff on the platter, right before my mother's horrified eyes."  (Page 197)
Foreshadowing to the subject of the anecdote that the character is about to mention:  "It is my earliest recollection: telling the Moon Lady my secret wish.  And because I forgot what I wished for, that memory remained hidden from me all these many years.  But now I remember the wish, and I can recall the details of that entire day..."  (Page 65)