Summary Of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan’s Use of Prologues to Bridge the Gap Between Chinese and American Culture
Cultural divides are difficult to overcome in storytelling because understanding another culture is a not an easy task. However, in The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan does a wonderful job of making the Chinese culture comprehensible to American readers. With a culture that is exceedingly different from the American way of life, Tan presents both cultures side by side in order to draw attention to their differences. One way she accomplishes this task is through the use of prologues that frame each of the four sections of the book. Each prologue gives the reader a cultural perspective, which allows for better interpretations of the book’s sections. These prologues unite …show more content…
In this section, as Jing-mei comes to terms with the death of her mother, she consequently realizes how far removed she is from her culture and heritage. After her mother’s death, Jing-mei is expected to take her place at the Joy Luck Club and she realizes she is ill equipped to do so. On top of feeling distanced from the other women, she feels she cannot take her mother’s place in the family. She is told about her mother’s quest to find her daughters and that she must carry on this duty and educate them on who their mother was to which Jing-mei replies, “What can I tell them about my mother? I don't know anything. She was my mother” (Tan 31). This admission conveys Jing-mei’s disconnect with her culture and appalls the other mothers because they fear the same attitude is present in their own daughters. An-mei exclaims, “Not know your own mother? … How can you say? Your mother is in your bones!” (Tan 31). This passage “articulates the anguish of the forgotten and obliterated, of not having progeny who would look back at ancestral ties with the past. All the mothers, Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, Ying-ying St. Clair, fear this genealogical obliteration” (Zenobia 254). This section illustrates the generational disconnect predicted in the prologue and establishes the main conflict of the novel: the cultural gap between Chinese-born mothers and American-born
Cultural divides are difficult to overcome in storytelling because understanding another culture is a not an easy task. However, in The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan does a wonderful job of making the Chinese culture comprehensible to American readers. With a culture that is exceedingly different from the American way of life, Tan presents both cultures side by side in order to draw attention to their differences. One way she accomplishes this task is through the use of prologues that frame each of the four sections of the book. Each prologue gives the reader a cultural perspective, which allows for better interpretations of the book’s sections. These prologues unite …show more content…
In this section, as Jing-mei comes to terms with the death of her mother, she consequently realizes how far removed she is from her culture and heritage. After her mother’s death, Jing-mei is expected to take her place at the Joy Luck Club and she realizes she is ill equipped to do so. On top of feeling distanced from the other women, she feels she cannot take her mother’s place in the family. She is told about her mother’s quest to find her daughters and that she must carry on this duty and educate them on who their mother was to which Jing-mei replies, “What can I tell them about my mother? I don't know anything. She was my mother” (Tan 31). This admission conveys Jing-mei’s disconnect with her culture and appalls the other mothers because they fear the same attitude is present in their own daughters. An-mei exclaims, “Not know your own mother? … How can you say? Your mother is in your bones!” (Tan 31). This passage “articulates the anguish of the forgotten and obliterated, of not having progeny who would look back at ancestral ties with the past. All the mothers, Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, Ying-ying St. Clair, fear this genealogical obliteration” (Zenobia 254). This section illustrates the generational disconnect predicted in the prologue and establishes the main conflict of the novel: the cultural gap between Chinese-born mothers and American-born