In The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan inserts a short story about a young girl who wishes to ride her bike and the mother who is against her riding past the corner where she cannot watch over her. The mother refers back to a book, “The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates”, and claims the girl will fall and she won’t be able to help the girl if she disappears from her sight. The girl protests and when the mother won’t reply to her question, out of frustration she yells “You can’t tell me because you don’t know! You don’t know anything!” (Tan 87). But as soon as the girl runs away on her bike, she falls even before she reaches the corner.
One of the biggest themes this book highlights is that mother’s always right. It’s not always because a mother is born more intelligent than their child, but because the mother has a story and experience that they learned from their own mothers. For Waverly Jong, when she wanted to start chess again, her mother Lindo Jong responded with disgust. She claimed that Waverly wouldn’t be able to relive up to her child prodigy status – and she couldn’t. Mother was right. Even Lindo Jong learned something from her own mother: stay the way you are. When Lindo Jong was sold to marry some stranger for the rest of her life by her mother, she managed to escape and learn to be true to herself. But it’s hard to accept a mother’s wisdom because accepting someone else’s advice means losing some self-pride. That’s why The Joy Luck Club highlights that you must listen to another person’s story in order to empathize with the person. Listening to another person’s story and taking something out of it requires a great deal of empathy, so it’s especially easier to learn from a mother because it’s easier to empathize with a person who lives with you 24/7.
I read this book at the end of sophomore and I have to agree that mother knowing best is a large theme. Currently, I am reading another book by Amy Tan called The Kitchen God’s Wife. This theme is also prevalent in that book. Winnie (the main character) is constantly telling her daughter Pearl what to do and how/when to do it. While Pearl sees her mother as controlling, Winnie’s advice comes from her own experiences and can actually help. Pearl doesn’t want to accept the advice because it means losing self pride, just like you said. I hope you enjoy the book and I look forward to making more parallels between the two!
I think you perfectly captivated the main theme of the book in your second paragraph. Each generation of women has a lot to learn from the previous generation, yet they don’t because of self-pride, as you stated. I think that the culture gap between America and China also serves to create an intangible barrier to communication between the daughters and their mothers. Because of their different upbringings, it’s very hard for each party to understand the other, even though their biological roots would indicate otherwise.
Thank you for sharing, Sua. What do you think of the dynamics shared between the mother-daughter relationships? Do you think this is something you might want to focus on for your literary analysis.
I can’t wait to hear what you think of the book as you continue!