What Is Waverly's Relationship In The Joy Luck Club

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In the novel The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan depicts the lives of four Chinese mothers with their American born daughters. In this novel, the story portrays the obstacles and hardships both the mother and daughter had to go through. One of the key problems all the mother-daughter pair had was the inability to communicate well with each other. Because of the inability to communicate and to express their emotions consequently leads to conflict and causes a strain in their relationships. Throughout this novel the lack of communication between the mothers and daughters leads to conflict between them. Firstly, in the Woo family Jing-mei struggles to tell her mother how she can’t be a prodigy like her mother wanted, leading to conflict between the…show more content…
For example, Waverly’s mother Lindo brags too much about her daughter. Contrast to the Woo family, Waverly was able to achieve being a prodigy. By doing that that made Lindo want to brag and boast about her daughter which set higher standards for Waverly to achieve. However what Waverly didn’t know was the meaning behind Lindo’s bragging, as Waverly states, “‘Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn to play chess?’”(Tan 101). Waverly doesn’t know the real meaning behind Lindo’s actions which causes a strained relationship due to lack of communication. Lindo states that by flaunting her daughter to everybody, Lindo is expressing her love for her daughter. If only Lindo would have talked to her daughter and tell that she is proud of her instead of flaunting, it would have prevented them being on negative…show more content…
Clair family the mother’s inability to communicate to her daughter makes it hard for Lena to understand Ying-ying. In Ying-ying’s past had led to her personality being an introverted person. The trauma of losing Ying-ying’s child was a traumatizing event for her which makes her a hard person to understand. As Lena relates, “And then she looked at me, in a strange way, as if she were begging me for her life, as if I could pardon her”(Tan 116). Lena doesn’t know how to handle this situation. Ying-ying’s husband doesn’t know either since there is a language barrier between them so he couldn’t understand. I believe that Ying-ying should communicate to her daughter about her problems so that Lena could help her recover and also help herself in the bad situations she’s in with her

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