The Joy Luck Club Hero's Journey Essay

The Unexpected Hero In Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, four immigrant Chinese women living in San Francisco start new families and are drawn to one another from the hardships of their past and the optimism of tomorrow. They form the Joy Luck Club. Author and professor of literature Joseph Campbell defines a hero as one “who [gives] his or her life” to a greater cause. The hero often discovers or accomplishes “something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience” (Campbell 1). Campbell’s hero can perform two different deeds: a physical deed where he or she partakes “in battle and saves a life” and a spiritual deed in which the hero is introduced to the supernormal range of human spiritual life and returns with “some life-giving elixir” (Campbell 1). In order to complete one of these deeds, the hero must be someone who has lost something or is “lacking in the normal experiences” of society. In which case he or she may literally go on an …show more content…
In The Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei “June” Woo, daughter of Suyuan Woo, undertakes and completes the Hero’s Journey because of her clear acceptance to the call to adventure, death and resurrection and return to the normal …show more content…
Upon reuniting with her lost sisters, Jing-mei sees the part of her which is Chinese, her family: “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese...It is my family. It is in our blood” (Tan 288). This is the elixir June has been searching for her entire life. Up until this point she never considered herself to be “Chinese” and thought she was more American than the latter all of her life. Now after finding this elixir June completes both a physical and spiritual deed: she has fulfilled her mother’s “long cherished wish” by venturing to China to meet her half-sisters and now is more mature about her own family and heritage from finishing the