The Joy Luck Club Essay
Introduction
Ever since her first novel The Joy Luck Club hit the shelves in 1989, Chinese-American writer Amy Tan has been heralded as the new voice of Chinese-American literature. The novel, which recounts the lives of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters in a short story format, spent nine months on the New York Times bestseller list. However, while critics have celebrated Tan for the cultural insights her works provide, the author herself is critical of the representative position she is expected to fill based on her heritage. In a 1995 interview, Tan expresses her discomfort with one-dimensional readings of her work that focus on culture and culture alone: Placing on writers the responsibility to represent …show more content…
That is not so say that literature can never reflect real conditions. Instead, the crux of McAlister's argument is that, although The Joy Luck Club “is not inherently more (or less) Asian-American literature than it is women's literature [or] mother-daughter literature”, it is predominantly the first category that defines the context in which it is read (6). In an effort to counter said reductive tendency of focusing on the cultural theme alone, this paper aims to revisit Two Kinds, one of Tan's most famous short stories from The Joy Luck Club, with the intent of presenting a reading that does not study protagonist Jing-mei Woo's crisis of cultural identity in isolation, but rather as part of a greater process of self-discovery. Amy Tan's Two Kinds explores how Jing-mei's refusal to adhere to her mother's expectations is the catalyst for the development of her own voice. A character analysis will demonstrate how this development manifests itself in her transformation from a passive to an active character, her changing self-image, and, lastly, the effects of this evolution on the relationship with her
Ever since her first novel The Joy Luck Club hit the shelves in 1989, Chinese-American writer Amy Tan has been heralded as the new voice of Chinese-American literature. The novel, which recounts the lives of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters in a short story format, spent nine months on the New York Times bestseller list. However, while critics have celebrated Tan for the cultural insights her works provide, the author herself is critical of the representative position she is expected to fill based on her heritage. In a 1995 interview, Tan expresses her discomfort with one-dimensional readings of her work that focus on culture and culture alone: Placing on writers the responsibility to represent …show more content…
That is not so say that literature can never reflect real conditions. Instead, the crux of McAlister's argument is that, although The Joy Luck Club “is not inherently more (or less) Asian-American literature than it is women's literature [or] mother-daughter literature”, it is predominantly the first category that defines the context in which it is read (6). In an effort to counter said reductive tendency of focusing on the cultural theme alone, this paper aims to revisit Two Kinds, one of Tan's most famous short stories from The Joy Luck Club, with the intent of presenting a reading that does not study protagonist Jing-mei Woo's crisis of cultural identity in isolation, but rather as part of a greater process of self-discovery. Amy Tan's Two Kinds explores how Jing-mei's refusal to adhere to her mother's expectations is the catalyst for the development of her own voice. A character analysis will demonstrate how this development manifests itself in her transformation from a passive to an active character, her changing self-image, and, lastly, the effects of this evolution on the relationship with her