The Motifs of Amy Tan in “The Joy Luck Club”
Often, Tan writes about struggling mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese- American experience. In Amy Tan’s novel “The Joy Luck Club,” she cultivates her life throughout the novel by illustrating connections between the characters in the novel and her own life. Equally important, Tan is the daughter of two Chinese immigrants, this is where her inspiration for writing about these differences comes into play. Tan and her own mother had difficulties that are presented in the “Joy Luck Club.” Some of these difficulties include the need to succeed and the pressure that Tan felt because of this. (Laurie Champion, 17.) Through sixteen stories of four Chinese mothers and their four American-born daughters, Tan shows how her life and these characters are compared. The parallels between Tan and each daughter gives rise to the themes of the novel. Amy Tan is an author that writes fluently about women’s issues, social issues, and cultural issues. In “Joy Luck Club,” Amy Tan uses three literary themes that develops the main idea of her novel and provides background to her own life. The three literary themes that are used to extract parallels between Tan and the daughters in …show more content…
An example of this theme in the Tan’s novel is when An-mei’s mother, who is not named in the story, cuts a piece of her flesh off in order to add it to her own mothers soup in hopes that it would cure Popo. An-mei’s mother then commits suicide and sacrifices her body to show her daughter to live her own life. The next example of the theme sacrifice is that Suyuan left her daughters in China in order to live a life of freedom and equality. This particular sacrifice led to devastation and regret, which is illustrated throughout the story by Suyuan. Each of the mothers sacrifice their lives in China in hopes of giving their daughters and family a better life in
Often, Tan writes about struggling mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese- American experience. In Amy Tan’s novel “The Joy Luck Club,” she cultivates her life throughout the novel by illustrating connections between the characters in the novel and her own life. Equally important, Tan is the daughter of two Chinese immigrants, this is where her inspiration for writing about these differences comes into play. Tan and her own mother had difficulties that are presented in the “Joy Luck Club.” Some of these difficulties include the need to succeed and the pressure that Tan felt because of this. (Laurie Champion, 17.) Through sixteen stories of four Chinese mothers and their four American-born daughters, Tan shows how her life and these characters are compared. The parallels between Tan and each daughter gives rise to the themes of the novel. Amy Tan is an author that writes fluently about women’s issues, social issues, and cultural issues. In “Joy Luck Club,” Amy Tan uses three literary themes that develops the main idea of her novel and provides background to her own life. The three literary themes that are used to extract parallels between Tan and the daughters in …show more content…
An example of this theme in the Tan’s novel is when An-mei’s mother, who is not named in the story, cuts a piece of her flesh off in order to add it to her own mothers soup in hopes that it would cure Popo. An-mei’s mother then commits suicide and sacrifices her body to show her daughter to live her own life. The next example of the theme sacrifice is that Suyuan left her daughters in China in order to live a life of freedom and equality. This particular sacrifice led to devastation and regret, which is illustrated throughout the story by Suyuan. Each of the mothers sacrifice their lives in China in hopes of giving their daughters and family a better life in