Background: this extremely long piece of writing was the paper for my major senior year project. Our assignment was to read two novels with an underlying connection and then discuss the similarities. For my project, I chose two novels of Asian-American writer Amy Tan and focused on the mother-daughter relationships. If you wish you use any part in your own research, please remember to give proper credit on your works cited page; no one likes a plagiarist!
Mother-daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s novels The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife: a critical essay examining the identity crisis present in Chinese-American daughters and their mothers’ “cultural healing” that unites East and West, old and new
(c) Nov. 6th, 2007 to Vivian A. Lee
AP English IV 2nd period Bickling
senior project 2007
The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, both novels written by Amy Tan, display the hardships that Chinese mothers face with their second-generation “American” daughters. Using short anecdotes and prose filled with cultural description, Tan reveals the differences among five mother-and-daughter pairs while at the same time revealing their similar deep wishes and connections: a desire to understand and to be understood, despite the generation gap that separates their mindsets, and to take their experiences and make a better future while still holding on to the wisdom of the past. In the case of these novels, Tan focuses on the different cultural patterns of Eastern and Western thinking, but in a broader sense, she also suggests the importance of creating an identity that will link the best of both worlds no matter what ethnicity or time. Both of these novels are written in the first person, allowing the reader greater depth into the characters’ minds to examine and develop empathy with each (Shen).
The Joy Luck Club, Tan’s first novel written in 1989 in her mother’s dedication, chronicles the lives of four mothers and their daughters. Although the novel is broken up into 16 short stories, the central theme of cultural roots and differences unifies the plot. Even though this format is a bit unconventional for a novel, it “allows the unconnected fragments of life, revealed from different but somewhat overlapping perspectives… to unfold into a meaningful, continuous whole so that the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between mother and daughter… may be illuminated through a montage effect on the reader.” (Shen) Likewise, the daughters’ stories often offer a warped reflection of their mothers’ past experiences; each mother-daughter pair also speaks of the other and expresses concern over their miscommunication.
The Kitchen God’s Wife, Tan’s second large novel, simplifies this web of connections into one mother-daughter pair: Winnie and Pearl, who also share the main theme of lack of communication. Pearl, who has scoliosis, has learned to keep secrets from her mother or only tell half the truth in order to make things easier between them. For example, Pearl refers to her job of speech rehabilitation by a fancy title so that her mother won’t criticize it in her blunt Chinese ways, referring to it as “teaching retarded people”. When Helen, convinced she will die of cancer, suggests that she should tell Winnie all of Pearl’s secrets, the latter takes it upon her to improve the rapport with her mother. Likewise, Helen also convinces Winnie to share the secrets of her past. Most of the novel is simply Winnie’s anecdote about the troubles in her past; troubles that Pearl had no idea about until this newfound bridge of communication was found.
Quite clearly these novels (although in this upcoming analysis they will be treated more as five individual stories rather than two novels) are linked in more ways than one. Besides sharing the same author, they focus on central themes of cultural differences, mother-daughter relationships, problems and improvements of communication, and ultimately, greater knowledge via embracing of heritage. Each group of characters shares something in common, be it an experience, hope, or weak characteristic. In emphasizing the storytelling aspects, Tan weaves an elegant tapestry of anecdotes – “intricate and haunting memories couched in carefully wrought stories.” (Shen)
The Mothers: deeply rooted to Chinese values
The three mothers in Joy Luck Club (and to some extent, Jing-Mei’s dead mother Suyuan) all share a common concern. As Jing-Mei states in the first short story, “They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and lucky do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds ‘joy luck’ is not a word, it doesn’t exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation” (Tan, 31). Although each mother has an individual aspect she seems to focus on, the underlying expression is the same; they wish for their daughters to understand and learn from their past and heritage in hopes that this wisdom will continue to live on. Winnie in The Kitchen God’s Wife exhibits the same desire, although at first she keeps it within her. In short, all of the mothers are deeply rooted to their Chinese values.
Walter Shear refers to them in his essay as “students who have learned about social realities around theme and use these experiences to come to conclusions about essential forms of character strength and weakness.” This is apparent in the way we can see the mothers’ past experiences connect with the discipline that they try to instill in their daughters. In Lindo’s story “The Red Candle”, she expresses her worry about Waverly’s future children and how they, like Waverly, will lose the strong filial ties that were so respected in Lindo’s time – so important, in fact, that Lindo suffers through a terrible marriage in order to remain respectful of her parents. Waverly even admits herself in “Rules of the Game” that her mother “imparted her daily truths so she could help me and my brother rise above our circumstances (Tan, 89).” Rose Hsu Jordan, in “Without Wood”, finally realizes that all of the assumptions she had made about her strict mother in the past had been wrongly derived – An-Mei had not wanted to restrict her daughter’s life nor make it miserable; she merely wanted to be able to help her daughter, fueled and inspired by the lessons she had learned in her young age after learning about the lies and deception that existed in the world. It is because of this experience that An-Mei is so concerned for Rose’s faltering marriage; she wanted Rose to be able to speak out for what she believed in, as opposed to An-Mei’s own oppressed childhood. In the end of this particular short story, Tan uses the metaphor of Old Mr. Chou, a harsh dreamland persona who ends up to be a friendly character after Rose can finally peer through the fog in her dream, to reveal Rose’s misconceptions about her mother.
In The Kitchen God’s Wife, the same personality is evident in Winnie. Her story, even more shockingly harsh than those of the mothers in Joy Luck Club, is brimming with lessons learned and perspectives renewed. Throughout the story, Winnie holds on to parts of her former life (be it a happy thought, such as sharing secrets with Peanut in the greenhouse, or material goods, such as her ten silver chopsticks) in order to mentally help herself through the bad times. Likewise, she indirectly shares this same principle with Pearl, telling her stories about her past life and emphasizing various Chinese beliefs. The entire time Winnie has lived in America, she has still kept close ties with her Chinese friends and principles, ultimately rooting herself in her own mother culture (Bussey); she talks around her meanings, a source of miscommunication with her daughter but common in older Chinese generations when women were expected to be modest and not so loud spoken. Winnie also emphasizes the difficulty of her previous life and compares it with Pearl’s life of convenience to help her daughter appreciate the life that she lives now (Bussey). At first glance, one may, as Pearl does, assume that this is typical of older lifestyles and believe it to be a hyperbole. In fact, Pearl, for the most part, is mildly exasperated about these discussions and does not appreciate the full value of her mother’s indirect teachings (for example, when Winnie attempts to give Pearl the Kitchen God altar). It is not until she hears her mother’s full tragic story does she finally realize the pain and suffering her mother has gone through and why she had always tried to keep Pearl close, protected, and well-raised.
These mothers are all “strong, determined, endowed with mysterious power, [and] all show similar concerns about their daughters’ welfare, possessively trying to hold onto their daughters (Shen).” Unfortunately, the daughters seem to be slipping away every day, and it is not until they are able to fully listen to and appreciate their mothers do they realize the power of their mothers’ Chinese philosophies.
The Daughters: and the search for cultural identity
The daughters of both novels suffer confusion, usually torn between the Eastern and Western ways of thinking. For the most part, they embrace the Western, “American” culture that they have been born into, which generates a detachment from their mothers and creates conflicts and misunderstandings. In a way, the daughters are caught in an identity crisis, facing divorce and other troubles with their Americanized ways of thinking and husbands. Shear describes this as “knowing possibilities rather than answers, puzzling over the realities that seem to be surrounding them and trying to find their place in what seems an ambivalent world” (Shear). Although different from their mothers in philosophy, however, the daughters exhibit the same desire to understand and be understood. After acknowledging that their marriages and lives may potentially be on the line, the daughters realize that perhaps their American ways of thinking are not the best after all. As Rose explains it in “Without Wood”, “there was a serious flaw with the American version. There were too many choices… so much to think about, so much to decide. Each decision meant a turn in the other direction (Tan, 214).” The daughters approach their mothers for “explanations, validations, and identity reinforcement and definition” (Shear), but are unable to fully connect until they are willing to listen to their cultural roots and accept a compromise of both philosophies and cultures.
Language, a literal representation of the communication barrier, comes into play more than once in the novel; the mothers attempt to speak broken English but falter and relapse into Chinese, while the daughters do not fully understand the Chinese idioms their mothers convey but rather talk back in English. Later in Joy Luck Club, when Jing-Mei asks her father for a retelling of her mother’s story, she insists he speak in Chinese after he starts in broken English. This return to Chinese, the mother tongue of all the principle characters, symbolizes finally a unity between the new and the old, the daughters and the mothers, the West and the East.
Mother-daughter Relationships: examination of the fragments and their bonds
As stated by Shen, the mothers and daughters share “neither the same realm of experience and knowledge nor the same concerns; their differences are not marked by a slip of the tongue or lack of linguistic adroitness or even by a generational gap, but rather b a deep geographical and cultural gap.” When these two perspectives are put together, one can clearly view the main conflict between the mothers and daughters: a clash of Eastern and Western philosophies. While the daughters perceive “cultural blanks”, the mothers tend to fill in too much, at times appearing too forceful in their cultural pride (Shear). Shen also points out the irony in this conflict: “The accomplishment of the mother’s dream for her daughter, a dream that entailed physical removal from her motherland, results in multifarious problems with her daughter” (Shen). The mothers have left China in order to pave a new destiny for themselves and their future daughters, but in doing so they have invited the problem of cultural drift into the story. For example, Lindo accuses herself of being responsible for Waverly’s attitude; she wanted Waverly to have the best of both worlds, but was unable to forsee that “her daughter’s American circumstances would not… mix well with the Chinese reality” (Shen).
In Joy Luck Club, the novel is made of two opposing sets of stories: two from the mothers telling of the wisdom and experiences they had in the past, and two from the daughters, one about growing up with their mothers and one about their current family troubles. By utilizing the “stories withint stories” format, Tan externalizes all of the characters’ mortal worlds and allows for a display of “motives, desires, pains, pleasures, and conerns in a simple yet dramatized fashion… stressing the mixture of action, consciousness, and subconsciousness” (Shen). In The Kitchen God’s Wife, the link lies in the two secrets of Winnie and Pearl. Although separated, each of these characters has a voice; each has a message they have always wanted to convey to their respective relation, but are unable to fully express themselves until they realize that this desire to verbally and spiritually share experiences is mutual. Each of these stories can be effectively grouped into sections (as in the case of Joy Luck Club) to centralize them even more. The prologue to each section introduces the running theme that ties all four stories together, and though they reside in different novels, these central themes extend to The Kitchen God’s Wife as well.
Feathers from a Thousand Li Away
“For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, ‘This father may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.’ And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.”
The prologue before the first section details the story of a young woman who attempts to bring a swan with her to America, with hopes of a new and better life. However, when she arrives, all of her possessions and swan are taken away. The only thing that remains of her big dreams is a single feather, which she stows safely away until her daughter is old enough to be explained its significance.
In parallel with this prologue, this section focuses on the mothers; how their childhood experiences have shaped who they are, and the hopes they possessed for their daughters. Since the story actually starts with Jing-Mei narrating in place of her now deceased mother Suyuan, the reader is already presented with an image of the Americanized daughter who grew up “speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow” (Tan, 3). By introducing us to Jing-Mei first, Tan establishes the mindset and attitude that the daughters have towards their mothers before delving into the stories that refute or explain the seemingly harsh facades of the mothers. In fact, she even symbolically shows the subdued side of the mothers: whereas An-Mei is described as “a short bent woman in her seventies, with a heavy bosom and thin shapeless legs” (Tan, 19), at the end Jing-Mei notes that as the mothers play mahjong and chat together as part of the Joy Luck Club, they become “young girls again, dreaming of good times in the past and good times yet to come.” (Tan, 32)
Each of the mothers as children come to realizations about the realities of life that she later tries to pass on to her children. An-Mei as a child was forced to forget her mother for most of her love, but she began to love her when she saw that mother’s love was deeper than the pain Popo (Chinese for “grandmother”) had caused her. “This is how a daughter honors her mother… The pain of the flesh… you must forget. Because that is sometimes the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her” (Tan, 41). Just like she was able to realize how strong her own mother’s love was, An-Mei hopes someday that her daughter Rose will be able to appreciate and reciprocate the same love. In this sense, An-Mei uses the metaphor of “peeling away skin” to stress the central theme of heritage and remembering where one’s cultural roots stem from.
Lindo has an important revelation on the day of her wedding, realizing that obeying her parents doesn’t mean forgetting herself and her identity. (”I remember the day when I finally knew a genuine thought and could follow where it went… I promised not to forget myself” [Tan, 63].) Filled with this new strength and courage, Lindo takes matters into her own hands and shapes her own future, something that is exaggerated when Lindo boasts about Waverly’s ability in chess later in the novel. Lindo is obviously filled with pride for her daughter; the possibility of expressing knowledge and ability is something that as a suppressed wife she was not able to do in China. However, Waverly misinterprets this motherly care as intervention.
As a contrast to Lindo, Ying-Ying does not find her identity but rather gives it up, becoming a “ghost”. She goes her entire life without much control over her path, and sadly regrets this in her old age: “Now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer of the beginning. I remember everything that happened that day because it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and loneliness” (Tan, 83). She tries to save her daughter from the same road, as there is striking parallel between her life and her daughter’s. Just as Ying-Ying is able to reflect on the past and find herself, this is a common goal shared by the daughters and displays the theme of “cultural healing” that prevails throughout the novel.
Although the daughters have always perceived their mothers as misunderstanding of their American lifestyle, the truth is that they lack full appreciation of their mothers’ pasts. The revealing of the lessons that each of the mothers have learned sheds light on and provides a backdrop for the reasons behind their behaviour in the next section narrated by the daughters to display their attitudes toward their mothers who still seem too fully rooted in traditional Chinese principles.
The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates
“… all the bad things that can happen to you outside the protection of this house. It is written in Chinese, you cannot understand it. That is why you must listen to me.”
“What are they then? .. You can’t tell me because you don’t know! You don’t know anything!”
The daughters, through each of their own stories, attempt to explain the difficulties that they face in association and understanding their mothers’ Chinese methods to attempt to teach their children virtues. Waverly admits herself that her mother “taught her the art of invisible strength” and “imparted her daily truths so she could help [her] older brothers and [her] rise about [their] circumstances” (Tan, 89). However, in most cases these good intentions are lost in passing between mother and daughter, and misunderstandings occur. In Waverly’s case, they drifted when she felt that she and her mother were too different. In essence, it is this variation in thinking and communication style that causes the drift in the first place.
Lena, unlike Waverly, takes a semi-passive approach to the difference between her and her mother. Like her mother, who makes up partly-true lies in order to protect and teach her, Lena reflects this by making up her own lies. “When a man at a grocery store yelled at her for opening up jars to smell the insides, I was so embarrassed I told her that Chinese people were not allowed to shop there. When the school sent a notice home about a polio vaccination, I told her the time and place, and added that all students were not required to carry metal lunch boxes, since they discovered old paper bags can carry polio germs” (Tan, 109-110). This avoidance of direct confrontation shows the difference between the two and yet also shows the similarity in how they avoid the truth to prevent a troublesome situation. Ultimately, this avoidance stems from the common theme: misunderstandings between the two generations and cultural styles. For example, Ying-Ying does not realize that etiquette in the States disallows her to open up the grocery market jars, but instead of directly stating the difference, Lena chooses to use the Chinese heritage excuse, in a way even brushing aside her own cultural roots as inferior.
As a contrast to An-Mei’s past, Rose originally sees her mother as someone who has lost her faith. When her brother Bing fell into the ocean, she witnessed her mother falter and give up, a surrender of her strength and faith, a realization that she could not take everything into her own hands. This difference between the strong and faithful woman Rose has always known her mother to be and the one that falters awakens Rose from her perceptions and makes her realize the change. Even though her mother still encourages her, Rose is worried since she thinks her mother will try in desperation to get her to fix her broken marriage, just as she tried in desperation to find Bing until ultimately, it ended in failure.
Finally Jing-Mei ties together the symbolism in this section with a classical story of a battle of wills, taking the clash of her desires and her mother’s desires to a literal level. “I looked at my reflection… the girl staring at e was angry, powerful. This girl and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts willed with lots of won’ts. I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I don’t be what I’m not” (Tan, 144), despite her mother’s efforts to “only ask her to be her best”. Jing-Mei, while finding her own headstrong Americanized identity, tosses away the filial respect that is expected of Chinese daughters, rebelling against her mother and her good intentions. This further separates them and eventually Suyuan stops trying to convert Jing-Mei into a prodigy, a product of her hopes and dreams in America.
American Translation
“‘Look inside. Tell me, am I not right? In this mirror is my future grandchild, already sitting in my lap next spring.’ The daughter looked… there it was: her own reflection staring back at her.”
The title of this section refers not only to the Americanized lifestyles that the daughters lead, but also the “translation” of their Chinese selves to American and vice versa. It is in this story that the daughters’ acceptance of their mothers slowly come into play and reveal new, alternate pathways for their troubles; pathways that could only have been opened via a combination of American and Chinese principles; a compromise.
Rose states the trouble between the American and Chinese ways of thinking in her second story: “Chinese people had Chinese opinions. American people had American opinions. And in almost every case, the American version was better” (Tan, 214). It is only later on in her life that she realizes that “there was a serious flaw with the American version. There were too many choices, so it was easy to get confused and choose the wrong thing.” With this knowledge in mind, Rose eventually goes to her mother for reconciliation and a brief delve back into the “Chinese opinions” that enable her to successfully deal with her troublesome divorce with Ted. In this case, it is the Chinese opinion that brings her strength to speak out, and Rose realizes this was what An-Mei had been trying to teach her all along.
Lena is currently suffering the results of a bad marriage; being too lenient has caused a stiff relationship between her and her husband, including a balance sheet taped to the refrigerator door that lists out how each of their money is shared. It takes Lena’s embarrassment after Ying-Ying questions this sheet before she realizes that perhaps it’s “not right” after all. When Lena confronts Harold about this later in the day, amidst their argument, a small table that represents their relationship (presented as a metaphor in the first pages of the story) topples over. Ying-Ying’s response is, “‘Fallen down.’”
“‘It doesn’t matter’”, Lena says, but Ying-Ying again questions her with, “‘Then why didn’t you fix it?’” This simple question evokes a sense of wonder and near shame in Lena as she realizes that her mother had been right all along in her predictions about her life and relationship. “I believe my mother has a mysterious ability to see things before they happen… but she sees only bad things that affect our family. And she knows what causes them” (Tan, 161). Just as Ying-Ying expresses regret for not being able to stop these malicious things, Lena mirrors this as she realizes, nearly too late, that she should have heeded her mother’s warnings. Though melancholy, this story subtly introduces the beginnings of Lena’s acceptance of her mother’s wisdom.
Waverly exemplifies the blend of Chinese and American cultures quite well as she tries to make her mother accept her American boyfriend Rich. After her refusal to continue to play chess, it was “as if she had erected an invisible wall and I was secretly groping each day to see how high and wide it was” (Tan, 190). When Waverly takes Rich home for dinner, she can see that his Americanized behaviour catches Lindo’s disapproving eye. Waverly begins to feel helpless, as if there is no possible way the Chinese and American lifestyles could blend together, but in reality, her mother slowly accepts her choice. It is then that Waverly realizes that her mother had never directly wanted to oppose her: “I knew what lay on the other side: Her side attacks. Her secret weapons. Her uncanny ability to find my weakest spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in” (Tan, 204).
Queen Mother of the Eastern Skies
“I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason. But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter… to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well. Little Queen, you must teach my daughter… how to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
The last and final section in The Joy Luck Club carries a note of inspiration for the future; even the prologue is expressive of the mothers’ hope for their daughters: “how to lose your innocence but not your hope.” All three mother stories, with the exception of Jing-Mei’s, take a closer look at the mothers’ pasts. Instead of just focusing on the childhood lessons they learned as in the first section, these final stories connect past to present, as the mothers themselves refer to their old Chinese life and their daughters’ new American ones in an attempt to transfer their former wisdom.
An-Mei, through her mother’s suicide, acquires a stronger spirit. She realizes that her mother’s suicide was an act of will; that she gave up everything to show An-Mei the reality that surrounded her. An-Mei does indeed see her mother’s love and the false faces of others, using this death and pain to change her own life. An-Mei takes this strength and wisdom and tries to teach Rose the same: “I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness. And… I taught my daughter the opposite” (Tan, 241). Likewise, Ying-Ying says, “I must tell my daughter everything… she will fight me… but I will win and give her my spirit, because that is the way a mother loves a daughter” (Tan, 286). Because she was unable to become more than a “ghost” in her lifetime, Ying-Ying wants to make a better future for her daughter so that she does not follow on the same path to destruction. Lindo and Waverly eventually realize that both their faces and their hearts are the same. Despite Lindo’s worrying of, “Which [face] is American? Which one is Chinese? Which one is better? If you show one, you must always sacrifice the other” (Tan, 304), she secretly hopes that Waverly can blend these two cultures to create her own, individual face that still carries traces of the best of both worlds.
The Kitchen God’s Wife
The Kitchen God’s Wife is comparable to an individual story section in The Joy Luck Club. It carries the same tone and underlying meaning: the meaning of mother/daughter relationships to enhance cultural respect and blend into a significant outlook for the future.
Both Pearl and Winnie have a secret, and only after hearing Winnie’s long story about her former life does Pearl finally understand the horrors that her mother has gone through. Despite her earlier misinterpretations of her mother’s intentions, she realizes the reason for much of her mother’s actions. As Tan argues the importance of fate and individual choice (Dew), she also imposes questions and parallels between Pearl and Winnie’s lives, especially through emphasis of the trials and tribulations of the latter. She emphasizes the “nobility of friendship” and the “necessity of humor” (Dew), two things that Winnie also wants Pearl to appreciate in her own life. Despite the seeming stereotypicality of Winnie, Dew in his critical essays suspects that it is Tan’s intention to “present us with a formulaic character and then slowly reveal to us our own misconceptions,” paralleling Pearl’s own personal revelation through the book.
This revealing of secrets allows for greater understanding of Winnie’s past and Pearl’s future; Pearl serves as the bridge between China and America. If she had not listened to and accepted her mother’s painful and dramatic past, she would not be able to pass on the principles and appreciation, and her daughters would not have any connection to their Chinese roots (Bussey).
Cultural Healing: the coexistence of East and West
At the end of The Joy Luck Club, Jing-Mei takes a trip back to China to find her half-sisters and share the memories and wisdom she has gained from her mother. When first told this news at the beginning of the novel, Jing-Mei is distraught as she finally realizes that she has not been fully listening and learning from her mother the way that she should have. However, at the end of the novel, Jing-Mei is used to represent the epiphanies, realizations, and changes that have taken place in the daughters’ lives. Although Jing-Mei herself has no communication with her mother throughout the course of the novel, the relationships between the other mother-daughter pairs serve as a representation of the transformation that happens in all of the daughters, including Jing-Mei. Although the conflicts from story to story are different, they all carry a universal theme that is shared among all five girls, including Pearl. Through others’ communications and experiences, the reader can readily infer that since these themes are universal, Jing-Mei also undergoes realization and appreciation for the mother who had tried to instill valuable Chinese principles in her daughter. When she makes her final trip back to China, Jing-Mei finally understands the true meaning of the lessons her mother has taught her, and she is ready to share them with her sisters. The transformation is complete, and she, along with the other daughters, has completed the journey of “cultural healing” to find their true identities: American-born girls with strong Chinese roots.
Despite the pre-1970 setting of Tan’s novels, the themes conveyed within are timeless. Just like the daughters of The Joy Luck Club and Pearl of The Kitchen God’s Wife, Chinese-American girls nowadays still face the same struggles of identity. Mothers attempt to instill Eastern morals in the daughters, who are constantly caught up in the whirlwind of American lifestyles. More often than not this causes conflicts, hardships, and ruthless bickering, but before these daughters depart on their journey into life, they will come to realize the goodness and truth seeped into their mothers’ endless lectures and teachings. It is then that they all realize that their heritage lies not in the American world they are submerged in, but the ancestry that dictates a sense of hope, courage, and pride to every descendant of China. These higher-generation American-born Chinese have the privilege of a wonderful combination between Eastern and Western thinking, creating a new philosophy that melds together the old wisdom with new experiences.
Though mothers and daughters may be separated by cultures, it is possible to find some timeless lessons and motifs that will forever link those of one generation to another. By seeking this desire to understand and gain from past wisdom, Chinese-Americans (and those of other cultures as well) can utilize this connection to their cultural roots to enhance their lives and establish an identity for themselves that unites the best of both worlds. Though these cultures may clash, they can also peacefully coexist.
After all, as ingenuously stated by Shear, despite the clash of cultural values, there is “always a possibility for the isolated ‘me’ to return home.”
We are home.