Essay On Gender Roles In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
1148 Words5 Pages
In the novel The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, many of the older Chinese women pass on certain attitudes, or aspects of viewpoints about women and their roles to their American daughters. Eight women, each mother-daughter pairs, narrate the novel. Their common getaway is the Joy Luck Club where each of the members play on the Mahjong table, bring foods, and (try) to forget the past, but also make new and better memories together. The Joy Luck Club was formed in San Francisco in the 1940’s by four Chinese emigrants. As the novel begins, in the 1980’s, one of the members of the club, Suyuan Woo, has just past away; her Americanized daughter June is expected to take her mother’s place at the MahJong table, due to her father asking her to take her spot instead. In this novel, not only did the mothers teach their daughters valuable lessons, but so did the daughters. Jing Mei (June) Woo’s mother, Suyuan Woo has passed away. But she believed that her daughter Jing-mei can be a child prodigy if she can find her talent and work with it well enough…show more content… She destroys her own marriage then comes to America and gets a job in a fortune cookie factory. She also meets and Tin Jong, and end up getting married to him. They have three children: Winston, Vincent, and Waverly. All Lindo wants is for her daughter to appreciate and respect her Chinese heritage, but Waverly is too American to do so. Waverly is lost and confused between two cultures. She is a Chinese American, but she does not clearly understand it. Waverly is torn between being American and Chinese at the same time. She wishes to have her own identity and be herself. When Waverly Jong was six years old, her mother taught her "the art of invisible strength," a strategy for winning arguments and gaining respect from others in games.This also helped her win arguments and fights when she grew older and kept that piece of her mother with