The Joy Luck Club Cultural Analysis

With the flow of immigrants from foreign countries constantly entering the United States, ideas and pieces of their culture have been brought with them and integrated into mainstream culture. However, especially with more recent waves of immigration, some pieces of their culture remain uniquely their own and sometimes cannot be directly translated into English and American culture. In The Joy Luck Club, the concept of “joy luck” remains untranslatable from mother to daughter, from Chinese culture to American. This is not because the words do not make sense in English, because they do, but simply because the daughters do not live the same lives their mothers have. The daughters’ lives are much easier, and they take their mothers’ sacrifices
Some of the daughters understand and can speak some Chinese, and most of the mothers can speak broken English. The difference of the languages they speak alone creates a cultural divide between them, making it impossible for the relationships to ever be fully developed and for the daughters to understand their mothers. The line “And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English,” placed at the beginning of the novel, immediately sets up a theme for the book: miscommunication and divide between cultures (17). The divide between their language drives this theme, and unfortunately does not completely resolve. The daughters can never understand the sacrifices the mothers have made, particularly Jing-mei, who has the most strained relationship with her mother out of all of the daughters. At one point in the novel before a moment of clarity and understanding, June claims that she cannot “tell [her sisters] about her mother” because she “[does not] know anything” about her (40). Though June and her mother are the most estranged pair, each of the daughters have strained relationships with their mothers, mostly due to the fact that they cannot understand each