The Joy Luck Club Literary Analysis

The Joy Luck Club tells the lives of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their four American born Daughters. In the book, every four chapters are grouped into a section. Every section is headed with an opening vignette. Each vignette portrays a theme that is common throughout the four stories that follow. The third section is called American Translation and is followed by stories of the four daughters. These four stories all share the common theme that the daughters are just americanized versions of their mothers. The first story in the section is called “Rice Husband”. This story is told from the point of view of Lena St. Clair, daughter of Ying-Ying St. Clair. At the beginning of the chapter Lena mentions how she “believe[s] [her] mother has the mysterious ability to see things before they happen” (Tan 149). Throughout the story Lena talks about how her and her husband, Harold, met. She tells how they fell in love, moved in together and got married. All the while she feels uneasy about little things that happen in their relationship. Eventually Lena breaks down and starts crying and yelling at Harold. In the argument they hear a glass shatter upstairs. They go up to the room that Lena’s mother is in to see that a vase has fallen of a poorly built end table. …show more content…
In this story there is a crab dinner celebrating Chinese New Year. In the story Jing-Mei and her mother, Suyuan, argued over who would get the the worst of two crabs. Both ladies wished to give the better looking one to the other. At the dinner Jing-Mei and Waverly get into an argument. After the dinner Suyuan gives Jing-Mei a gold necklace with a jade pendant. The theme of American Translation is shown in two parts of this story. The first is when Jing-Mei and her mother are arguing over the crab. The second is at the very end when Jing-Mei tries to shoo away a cat in the same way her mother used to (Tan