Joy Harjo

In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the author chooses to primarily focus her novel on the miscommunications between traditional Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters via the use vignettes from almost every character. Throughout the novel, Tan writes about several characters that have made a hero’s journey according to Joseph Campbell. Campbell states that a hero’s journey includes: a departure, how a hero sets off onto their journey, a fulfillment, their goal that is being accomplished,…

Rodin Taylor a speech pathologist is added to Ann Marie’s therapeutic team, she advises Catherine that all children have some form of communication and her objective is to change Ann Maries learned communication structure into a more conventional form. Within the first half hour session Catherine struggles yet views Bridget putting temperamental Ann Marie into a chair and repeating this action until Ann Marie looks for Catherine. Bridget then states “look at me” then observes whether Anne Marie…

Cultural Significance “The Joy Luck Club and My Life” Culture significance is one of the key elements in The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. What I mean by cultural significance is that the book shows the historic, social and spiritual value for past and present generations of mothers and daughters. The novel is about four Chinese mothers who have migrated from China to the United States, all the mothers migrated for different reasons, some were looking for a better life for their daughters and…

Mother and daughter relationships are a prominent theme in The Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club was Mahjong club, organized by a group of brave women, to escape from their struggles in a war torn Kweilin, and was continued on in America. Amy Tan utilized the experiences she had growing up in a household with a Chinese immigrant mother, to inspire the plot of the novel. In The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan analyzes the relationship between mothers and daughters in a generation gap of Chinese cultured…

Tiger in the Shadows Ying-ying St. Clair is one of the four Chinese mothers in Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club. Ying-ying gets thrown into her voyage when she falls from a boat as a child. She faces many trials such as marrying a bad man, having an abortion, giving birth to a stillborn, and becoming lifeless. These incidents qualify Ying-ying as a hero because she “learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life . . . "(Campbell). According to a scholar, Joseph Campbell, a…

In The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan are mostly about mothers and their daughters' generation gap of miscommunications and misunderstandings. Some daughters and mothers may get along, but some don’t. In The Joy Luck Club there were four Chinese mothers: Ying-ying St. Clair, Lindo Jong, An-mei Hsu, and Suyuan Woo. Also with four Chinese daughters: Rose Hsu Jordan , Jing-mei Woo, Waverly, and Lena St. Clair each all have miscommunications and misunderstandings. Throughout the novel, Lena’s mother,…

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan contains many short narratives told by eight Chinese females living in America. In one of the narratives, Two Kinds, one can envision the enormity of the pressure and frustration exchanged between an expectant parent and a depressed child. Most children are told “you can be a prodigy, too” by their parents, which paves a long road of struggle and stress (132). In Two Kinds, the standards of an adult for a child can bring stress, frustration, and sorrow for both…

“Two Kinds”, authored by Amy Tan, is an inspirational short story that revolves around the idea of becoming independent and successful. The story follows Jing-mei who is the daughter of chinese immigrant, Suyuan Woo. Woo has looked to America as a fresh start for her daughter and herself after losing such great loss back home; her first husband, parents, two daughters, and twin baby girls. Coming from a tragic past, she has hope for Mei and tries to prevent her daughter from having the miserable…

The key conflict in The Joy Luck Club is that between mother and daughter. The mothers were all born in China so they grew up with traditional Chinese beliefs. The daughters, however, were all born in America or moved to America a young age, so their lives outside of the home were American. The source of conflicts in the book is mostly that the mothers are more traditionally Chinese and the daughters are more Americanized. The root of these problems can be traced back to the concept of happiness…

The Joy Luck Club is not only the title of an amazing novel and now a movie; it is also the name of the weekly gathering that four Chinese women have participated in for many, many years. The movie The Joy Luck Club opens after the death of Suyuan Woo, the founding member of the Joy Luck Club. Suyuan passed away without fulfilling “an important thing on her mind” (Tan, 1989 p. 38): to be reunited with her twin daughters who she had left while escaping from the war in China. The other three…