What Is The Relationship Between Amy Tan And The American Dream

When families move from other countries to the United States of America, they go through many stages of culture clashes to try to fit in and also retain most of their original culture. Migrating from a country that has no similarities to the new country you are moving to can be very tough and it could be even more so when you have children. The United States is made up of immigrants and a lot of people make the transition every day. We often look past it because we are so focused on our own life and we have already adjusted but keeping your old traditions and trying to learn new ones is a very stressful undertaking.
Amy Tan is a daughter of a Chinese immigrant mother, who believes in the American dream. Her mother went through some difficult
But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways” (132). Amy Tan’s mother had the American dream for her daughter, she wanted her to become a prodigy, she spent a lot of time and effort to make this happen for her daughter. Like any other daughter of that age, Amy rebelled against her mom and her mom’s wishes for her to become a prodigy. Her mother traded housecleaning services to an old retired piano teacher in order for her daughter to have piano lessons and a piano from which to learn so that Amy, her daughter can become a prodigy like she had dreamed for her. Amy at the time did not appreciate her mother’s effort and the lengths she went for her and she made a mockery of the whole situation. She made her mother believe that she was getting better skilled
“The mother-daughter relationships in both China and the United States represented in The Joy Luck Club not only provide a link between the past and the present but also suggest how the ability, or the inability, for mothers and daughters to share geographically informed cultural stories influences both mother-daughter relationships and individual and cultural identity” (83). Although China is the main country in this passage, other immigrant mothers from different other countries can relate with the tension the move has on their relationship with their daughters. The mothers expect their daughters to behave like daughters behave from their home country and the daughters just end up being very invested in the American culture and both parties find that they have to adjust in order to find peace and balance “Mothers from China and their American-born daughters struggling to understand each other-allows for a rich array of dialogized perspectives within single utterances: the Chinese, the American, and the Chinese-American, all three of which can be discerned, to varying degrees, in the monologues”