The Joy Luck Club Rhetorical Analysis

In the New York Times Bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses symbolism and diction to portray to the audience that the main antagonistic force stems from language barriers. The novel focuses on Chinese women immigrants and their daughters. All of the mothers come to America with high expectations and aspirations for both their future daughters and themselves. The mother’s first language is Chinese but their daughters grew up speaking English this causes rifts in their relationships’ because of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. A passage in the beginning of the novel tells the story of a woman that comes to America with a swan that was once a duck but stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose but turned into something entirely
different. The bird symbolizes the woman's dreams and hopes for her and her daughter’s future but when she reached America her swan was taken away from her and she was left with only a feather. Years later when her daughter is grown and the women in old she wished to tell her daughter, “This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.” And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.” (pg17JLC) The mother could not fully communicate to her daughter so the daughter never fully understood her mother and the reasoning behind her actions. Though misunderstandings occur within mother-daughter relationships just because of the generational gap, when the different languages and culture are added into the mix, the relationship is even more complex.