JLC: Ceritane Wong Chino neng Amerika

I am interested in this autobiography (Joy Luck Club, herein JLC) partly due to the fact that this book explores the experiences of Asian people who live in the US. Certainly, the generic term Asians vary in terms of nationalities, such as Pakistan, India, China, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, and others. In each national group there are various races with a variety of cultural norms, traditions, manners, and belief systems. Joy Luck Club (1989) is a novel that represents a different culture of mine. Drawing upon the devastating impacts of the World War II, this autobiography presents two generational conflicts between four Chinese-born mothers immigrating to the US and their respective American-born daughters. This 288-page novel consists of the life stories of four mother-daughter pairs (i.e. Suyuan vs. June; Lindo vs. Waverly; An-Mei vs. Rose, and Ying-ying vs. Lena).

A few years after her arrival in the US, Suyuan established mah jong (Chinese traditional gamble) group with three other Chinese female immigrants for the purpose of creating social and psychological support among each of them. All these women came to the US with some commonalities, such as suffering from war-stricken experiences, poverty (except Ying-ying), and lost identities. Suyuan suffered from a lifetime torture of giving up her twin daughters on the road while fleeing from Japanese troops; Ying-ying lost her faith in a good life due to being betrayed by her first husband; An-Mei lost her mother and later was raised by a promiscuous, wealthy step-father; and Lindo had to marry a spoiled, sexually deviant son of a wealthy family. All these mothers brought their Chinese experiences and values within themselves and they wanted to impart them to their daughters. Unfortunately, all they knew were Chinese contexts in the past, and thus unprepared to face the American realities.

Their Chinese experiences, values, and wisdom were hardly translatable to the ears of their Americanized daughters, making a continuous tension and nuisance to the end of the story. For the mothers, total obedience – meaning that children were not allowed to question their parents – was the reflection of an unchallenged parental authority. These mothers were raised to believe that the world would run this way everywhere, including in the US where free will and individualism were nurtured. For these mothers, the American ways seemed to spoil their daughters. On the other hand, the daughters were unable to understand their mothers’ esoteric language and symbolic terms and gestures.  It is true that all the mothers struggled in economic hardships and transition to Christianity as a way of survival upon their arrivals in the US for the first time, but the unifying theme is the tensions and conflicts with their daughters in their efforts to maintain their own identities.

A case in point, having lost the faith in true love after her first husband left her, Ying-ying also lost faith in a good life. The marriage tragedy in her early life made her suspicious to almost anything around her. She believed that the settings of the house or furniture in the room would influence whether the luck would come or stay away from its residents. Lena, her daughter, was unable to grasp her mother’s behaviors (of continually changing the sofa and bedding). Her mother kept telling her about bad luck and bad signs around her, but Lena didn’t know anything about what her mother talked about - despite the fact that she finally found the truth (a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy) in the words of her mother.

The generational, communicative miss-matches were also reflected in the case of Lindo vs. Waverly.  A chess prodigy, young Waverly brought a sense of pride for her mother. Lindo kept boasting her daughter’s prodigy to passers-by by taking the magazine with Waverly’s picture on the cover page. Heavily ashamed, Waverly was mad at her mother, and the lingering bone of contention was born from that moment. It was bad that Lindo misunderstood her daughter. Waverly was not happy with her mother’s action of boasting her. Instead, Lindo believed that her own daughter was ashamed of her own Chinese mother: Lindo felt betrayed by her own daughter.

June May had different problems with her mother. She was unable to fulfill her mother’s wishes. She failed to graduate her college degree, and remained unmarried even when she was already 36. The recurrent patterns of conflicts between this pair were her failures to compete with the bright Waverly who always outsmarted her. June’s mother seemed to be partly baffled by her old secret (of abandoning her twin daughters on the roadside during the war) and unable to express herself in poignant manners so as to make June understood her very well.

An-Mei grew up in a dire condition. Early in her life, she witnessed her own mother to be degraded by her own family. Her mother was accused of selling her body to a wealthy man. An-Mei finally learned the truth and the dignity of her mother and started to acquire the self-worth in her life. She later raised her children to develop this self-worth, only to find out that one of her daughters, i.e. Rose, imparted the traits of her own mother. Rose did not see her own self-worth – the fact that put her own marriage at the brink of failure.

By the end of the story, three could reconcile. Waverly and Lindo finally developed a better understanding of each other. June May felt relieved when she met the long lost twin daughters in China. An-Mei helped Rose develop her own self-worth after disclosing An Mei’s mother to Rose. Ying-ying vs. Lena were the only one whose ending was not that clear.

In summary, these American-born Chinese daughters sought their own ways - they embraced American culture and in the same time triggered the tensions with their mothers. Seeing how their daughters grew differently from their own, and frequently tumbled upon life difficulties, the mothers felt how deprived their daughters from their own roots. These mothers believed that their own Chinese upbringings in the past had successfully shaped the ways they were - being successful in dealing with life difficulties in this foreign land. Thus, these mothers kept telling them the Chinese wisdom in exact ways they received them from their mothers in the past: using a lot of symbolic terms and gestures - that unsurprisingly frustrated their daughters. These daughters needed candid explanations, not just symbols to interpret or total obedience without any room for negotiation.

How can we use this book for educational purposes? Amy Tan should get the credit for writing the series of Chinese female narratives and bringing this into American readership. It is true that the typical Chinese - and other Asian - people in general hold the beliefs that seniority matters. Children are not supposed to challenge the authority held by parents or senior members of the community. It might have been true as well that those females were poorly treated and considered as a property or commodity to trade in the 1920s and earlier. In the contemporary context, Kishore Mahbubani (2004) even argues that one of the reasons for brain drain suffered by Asian countries is the seniority that does not allow bright, young people to experiment their thoughts and ideas. The downside of the story, as well as the scholarly work of Mahbubani’s inquiry, is that such a kind of narratives may also in the same time create a new stereotype concerning the roles of males and females in Asian countries. Thus, I may suggest this book, its movie, and also available criticism as a springboard to learn Asian cultures more deeply. Rather than accepting this book as a final product or a singular truth, I would treat it as an entry point to learn the biases. The following links can be of helpful sources to stimulate further discussion:

http://www.mediacircus.net/joyluckclub.html
http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/joy-luck-club-amy-tan
http://www.eskimo.com/~webguy/writings/joysucks.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20060221132558/www.cs.indiana.edu/~tanaka/disparity/JLC.txt