Joseph Campbell once wrote, “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself,” and the hero’s journey is divided into three separate parts: departure, fulfillment, and return. Though at first glance, Suyuan Woo, from Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, doesn’t appear to meet this definition of a hero, she actually satisfies it by devoting her life to improving her daughter’s life. Suyuan’s early life is spent in Kweilin, in the midst of the second Sino-Japanese war. Though it might not be the case for the average person living at that time, Suyuan’s frugal life was her comfortable status quo. That was where she started the Joy Luck Club. Suyuan devoted one day a week to lifting the spirits of her and her friends.
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Jing-Mei constantly bickered with her mother, especially considering how insatiable her mother’s hope was. Suyuan endlessly forced Jing-Mei to attempt different hobbies, to see if Jing-Mei was withholding a hidden talent that just had to be discovered. This misunderstanding led to much tension between the pair, ultimately exploding after Jing-Mei’s mortifying piano recital. “‘Then I wish I’d never been born!’ I shouted. ‘I wish I were dead! Like them.’ It was if I had said the magic words. Alakazam!...and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless” (Tan 142). Even though it may have seemed that it was impossible to recover from such an insult, Suyuan decided to give the piano to Jing-Mei for her thirtieth birthday in order to make amends. Suyuan used to force Jing-Mei to take all sorts of lessons, but as Suyuan faced trial after trial, she finally began to realize that Jing-Mei simply wasn’t meant to be a child prodigy. Overall, however, Suyuan didn’t appear to be particularly good at adapting to American culture, as evidenced by her broken English and unwillingness to relinquish her tight hold on Chinese
Jing-Mei constantly bickered with her mother, especially considering how insatiable her mother’s hope was. Suyuan endlessly forced Jing-Mei to attempt different hobbies, to see if Jing-Mei was withholding a hidden talent that just had to be discovered. This misunderstanding led to much tension between the pair, ultimately exploding after Jing-Mei’s mortifying piano recital. “‘Then I wish I’d never been born!’ I shouted. ‘I wish I were dead! Like them.’ It was if I had said the magic words. Alakazam!...and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless” (Tan 142). Even though it may have seemed that it was impossible to recover from such an insult, Suyuan decided to give the piano to Jing-Mei for her thirtieth birthday in order to make amends. Suyuan used to force Jing-Mei to take all sorts of lessons, but as Suyuan faced trial after trial, she finally began to realize that Jing-Mei simply wasn’t meant to be a child prodigy. Overall, however, Suyuan didn’t appear to be particularly good at adapting to American culture, as evidenced by her broken English and unwillingness to relinquish her tight hold on Chinese