Comparing Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club and The Woman...

Comparing The Joy Luck Club and The Woman Warrior Amy Tans immensely popular novel, The Joy Luck Club explores the issues faced by first and second generation Chinese immigrants, particularly mothers and daughters. Although Tans book is a work of fiction, many of the struggles it describes are echoed in Maxine Hong Kingstons autobiographical work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The pairs of mothers and daughters in both of these books find themselves separated along both cultural and generational lines. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs, and geographic loyalty. The gulf between these women is sadly acknowledged by Ying-ying St. Clair when she says of†¦show more content†¦Communication becomes impossible (Huntley 46). This anecdote sets the stage for conflict between the Chinese mothers and their American daughters. The issue of the language barrier is a constant theme in both The Joy Luck Club and The Woman Warrior. In the immigrant narrative, English plays a major role in assimilating into the new world. For Tan, the struggle between Chinese and English haunts both her real life and her fiction. Tan herself stopped speaking Chinese at age five, though she has never lost her first language entirely (Amy). Her mother, Daisy, however, speaks in a combination [...] of English and Mandarin (Huntley 3). Tan was taunted in grade school for her mothers heavy Shanghai accent (Huntley 3). Because Daisy never became fluent in English, the linguistic friction merely escalated between the two women (Amy). Tan expresses this tension in her novel when the fictional Jing-mei admits that she has trouble understanding her mothers meaning, and empathizes with her aunties who see daughters who grow impatient when t heir mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English (Tan 40-1). The stresses of a bilingual relationship are further explored when Lena St. Clair finds herself acting as translator between her Chinese mother and English-Irish father, who each refuse to learn the others language, placing their daughter in the cultural crossfire (Tan