"And now I see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go".
-Page 288
I feel that this quote is the most significant in the whole book. It of course relates to each mother and daughter from the Joy Luck Club. The whole time the mothers were worried about their daughters losing their heritage. Lena,Waverly, Rose, and June were all living their lives differently from how they lived growing up. Ying-ying, Lindo, An-mei, and Suyuan would watch their daughters make their own mistakes and go through their own troubling times. They found it insulting that their daughters did not come to them for advice. However, even after divorces and other troubles, they would always have their Chinese mothers to come back to.
I remember my last break up when I was feeling as low as can be. When I came home my mother and sister built me back up again and turned my saddness into a new sense of hope for something better. Family doesn't always get along well and may not agree on everything, but they will always their for you through your ups and downs. Just as your heritage will always be with you, so will your family.
The ARGUMENT of they story as Lindo puts it is, "These two faces, I think, so much the same! The same happiness, the same saddness, the same good fortune, the same faults"(256).
"It means were looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also another...".
-Page 266
Lindo Jong discusses how she and her daughter are alike and different in the chapter Double Face. They both have the same physical traits, but they view circumstances differently. While in a beauty parlor for Waverly's wedding, Lindo describes how Waverly acts a lot more American than she does Chinese. However, Lindo comes to admit that she has also adapted American traits too, so much so that when she went back to visit China she was treated as a foreigner.
This quote sums up Double Face pretty well. It describes how their American and Chinese intentions are intertwined. It also reveals Lindo and Waverly's mischievous side once again. They have become accustomed to the American way of life. I feel that this quote relates to all of the characters of this book, especially the Joy Luck Club daughters. Lena, Waverly, Rose, and June have all wanted to embrace their life the American way, but this disappoints the mothers. The members of the Joy Luck Club feel embarrassed that their daughters would rather follow their own society, instead of wanting to be just like their mothers. This reminds me of my sister and my baby niece Bella. My sister was convinced when Bella was just a few months old that she liked our mother more than her. It really made her upset that her daughter preferred someone else over her. It's a common thing for a mother to want to be the most important person in their children's lives, but they must know that kids go back and forth between things. Parents will always reign as most important because they will always be there even as everything else in their child's life changes.
This quote also relates to June in A Pair of Tickets. This is so because when she goes to China with her father to meet her mother's long lost twin daughters, she is also in search of finding her Chinese side. She acts as an American women although she is of Chinese decent. She is looking to combine what was so important to her mother with how she has been living her life. June comes to find out that the part of her that is Chinese is her family.
The literary term I found in Double Face was SYNETHESIA. While describing how she acted and what she wore on her visit to China Lindo said this, "I did not wear loud colors"(266).
"If she doesn't speak she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever".
- An-mei
-Page 215
This quote spoke the loudest to me out of these three chapters. I felt it had a connection to each character. It emphasizes the importance of taking action to make a change. If you just sit back and watch things around you fail then the damage it causes is partly your fault. In today's society when citizens are disappointed in what the government is doing they do not have the right to critize if they are not voting. They only way they have room to talk is if they vote and choose the leader who they feel will make the best discisions. If they don't then they have lost their chance to make a difference for the better. It is always better to take initiative than to pass on opportunities.
June decribes her mother's last Chinese New Year's crab dinner in the chapter Best Quality. We come to see how June and her mother Suyuan are similar in the fact that they let other's take the best quality stuff, such as the best crabs. June recalls her mother giving her, her jade neckalace that night. She remembers thinking it wasn't the finest of jewlery when her mother said, "This is young jade. It is a very light color now, but if you wear it every day it will become more green"(208-209). I took this to mean that if you take pride in what you have, others will think it is made out of the finest quality materials. Others will see what you have as you see it.
In Magpies, An-mei tells us about her childhood when she left with her mother, who was banished from their family home for marrying again and becoming a concubine. She tells us of how she came to find out that her mother was forced into becoming Wu Tsing's fourth wife. An-mei's mother commited suicide to insure that An-mei and her baby brother would be promised a good life. The story in this chapter reminded me of a video I had seen before. Towards the end part of Amy Tan's interview below, I noticed that Tan was saying that she recently went to the place where her grandmother had been raped, had a baby, and then took her own life. This made me think that possibly Tan was writing about her grandmother as An-mei's mother's character.
In Waiting Between the Trees I really started disliking Ying-ying St. Clair. It gave me the impression that she was just a rich snob. I understand that she got married to a bad man who she loved and that he left her while she was pregnent with their son. She gets sympanthy from me for that. I just do not understand why she would feel it was okay to kill her baby in spite of her husband. She lets her husband leaving her ruin her life. When she finds out that he died she turns into a ghost of herself and marries Lena's father not out of true love. I feel that she is kind of a rich snob because she doesn't really appreciate anything Lena's father offers her and continuously says that she has seen better. Instead of pulling herself up from the bottom, she just buried herself further down and took everyone around her down with her.
All three of these chapters use a FRAME DEVICE. These are stories within other stories. "I can still hear what happened more that sixty years ago. My mother was a stranger to me when she first arrived at my Uncle's house in Ningpo..."(215-216).
"'A girl is like a young tree,' she said. 'You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away.'"
-An-mei
-Page 191
I feel that this quote applies to all three of these chapters. In each chapter Lena, Waverly, and Rose all show their insecure sides and reveal their relationship problems. They all want to avoid going to their mother's for their words of wisdom, but it is inevitable. Last Sunday when I went to mass the Gospel reminded me of this quote. There was a proverb in it that compared the weeds in a wheat field to sins and evil. In the quote I chose from the chapter, Without Wood, An-mei was telling Rose that if she lets other people influence her then her life won't be her own. Her life will flow in all different directions. She needs to think for herself, and with her mother's guidance, her life will be on the right track. This relates to the gospel reading I heard because God is leading us on a righteous path, but the weeds are meant to trip us up and lead us in other directions. This is just like when Rose is constantly tempted to seek advice from others to make the next move in her life.
The quote also applies to Lena in the chapter Rice Husband. She is influenced by her husband Harold and her mother Ying-ying. In Rice Husband, Lena is having marital problems when her mother comes to visit. She realizes that she and Harold are totally independent from one another. Lena is on her own financially, which Ying-ying, in her oh so subtle way, points out. She recalled a time in her life when her mother told her she would marry a bad man if she didn' eat all of her rice. Now this prediction has seemed to unfortunately, come true in her eyes. While reading the blog Finding the Joy in Being Together I agreed that her mother at the end of the chapter was trying to warn her to try to fix her marriage before it breaks.
In Four Directions, Waverly, a single mother, has difficulty telling her mother she is engaged to a non-Chinese man, Rich. He is awkward around her family, but she is in love with him. Her mother always finds flaws and Waverly is afraid that when she points them out they will affect how she herself feels about Rich. She felt she was being pulled in different directions. Her relationship with her mother was affecting her relationship with her fiance.
Chapter eleven, Without Wood is about Rose Hsu Jordan searching for answers as to why her marriage failed. She asks Lena and her other friends what the next move she should make is, but avoids her mother. The quote I have chosen is the explanation as to why her life, like her garden has fallen apart. I agree with An-mei's metaphor. People who listen only to others and not themselves do not have their own life. Instead they are just mimicing another life.
The literary term I chose for these chapters was SYMBOL. In Rice Husband two symbols are the rice and the table. The overgrown weeds in Rose's garden are the biggest symbol in Without Wood. "And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction"(196).
"America is where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls".
-Page 132
This quote lays out Suyuan's reasoning for the things she did in her life. Many people traveled to America, because it was the land of opportunity. They wanted to forget all of the oppression they faced in their past life and start new to be what ever they wanted to be. Unfortunately in this chapter we see that Suyuan put a little too much pressure on her daughter, June, to be the best she could be. At first June was excited to be a "prodigy" at something, but when she saw the disappointed look on her mother's face once again after she failed one of her other tests, she started to hate the idea of being a prodigy. She hated the disappointment and started to resent her mother for pushing her to try all these different things in hope that she would be the best. Like a normal teenager, June rebelled the more she was pushed. Suyuan told her, "There are only two kind of daughters, those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!"(142). June was inobedient and when she failed her piano recital at the First Chinese Baptist Church's talent show, she blamed her mother for setting her up for something she could not do. In reality however, she failed only because she did not care enough to try.
It is almost a guareentee that if you do not try you are setting yourself up to fail. People at school always say that they know they are going to fail a test and if they do not put the effort into studying then we all know they are going to fail because they did not try. If you put in effort there is a good chance that you will succeed, but if not you are destined to fail. June set herself up to fail, because she thought her mom would be rewarded if she succeeded. This is yet another example of a strained mother-daughter relationship in this book. Yes, maybe at the surface Suyuan wanted June to be a prodigy because of selfishness because of her competition with Lindo, but I think it was really deeper than that. I feel that, as summed up from the first page of the chapter, Suyuan just had hope for the best life possible for her family.
There are several DENOTATIONS throughout all of the chapters. A denotation is the literal meaning of a word. An example of this is, "...'Ni kan' -You watch"(132).
"And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation". -Page 131
Rose, An-mei's daughter, is getting a divorce and is nervous to tell her mother. She knows her mother will tell her to keep trying to make the marriage work. Although Rose feels that all hope is lost for her marriage, An-mei tells her that even though there may not be hope it is still her life and she should still try to take control of the situation. Everyone thinks that An-mei gave up on faith along time ago when her son Bing fell into the ocean and was lost forever, but Rose sees past that. Once Bing died at the age of four, An-mei used her white Bible, that she carried around so faithfully, as a tool to hold up the table. She had lost her faith and put her trust in fate. However, as Rose recalls, when Bing fell into the ocean An-mei put her trust in God's hands and would not give up hope. She truly believed that she could find him and bring him back, but unfortunately she was wrong and that's when she "lost" her faith and banished the Bible. Rose, however, knows that this is not completely true. She recognizes her mother looking at the Bible under the table from time to time. She teaches her daughter that just because there is no hope does not mean that she can not change the reality.
The quote I have chosen explains that you can change fate by paying attention to what has already happened and by undoing what is expected. This quote was meant to teach people that they can control their fate if they care enough to try to change it. It is also saying that ultimately when the chips are down, you turn to your faith whether you mean to or not. Personally, in my own life, I find myself always turning to prayer when I am going through a rough time, whether it is a family problem or a test at school. I feel that often people try to blame fate when something goes wrong. When it reality it seems that if they would have been conscious of what was going on around them, things could have turned out for the better.
This chapter is an example of the many ANECDOTES in this novel. It tells a brief narrative of a particular incident. "We had gone to the beach to a seculded spot south of the city near Devil's Slide..."(121).
"The mother nodded: 'Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worst possible thing"'.
-Page 115
Lena St. Clair is the speaker in this disturbing chapter. She is the daughter of "Auntie" Ying-ying. She speaks of the depression her mother had as she grew up. Her mother was always frightened by evils. She was convinced there was an evil man in their old basement and random strangers were going to impregnate her daughter and then kill them all. Lena realized when she was five that she began to see terrible things too. She saw "devils" in the sandbox and other frightening things that would always be around. Although she learned to deal with them her mother could not. Lena tells the story of how her mother and father found out they were pregnant with her younger sibling and then lost the baby. Ying-ying said she knew the baby was going to die. After the miscarriage she began to break down piece by piece, until she was almost always in bed. Lena watched as her mother deteriorated.
They lived in an apartment where Lena could hear the family on the other side from her bedroom. Every night as she went to sleep she would listen to the most awful fights between a mother and her twelve year old daughter. It sounded as if she were beating her half to death and screaming bloody murder. Lena thought about her life compared to that girl's and thought she had the better deal. She was not as upset about her life, knowing that it could be worse. The quote I have chosen from this chapter explains that once you have witnessed or experienced the worst thing then you know that there is nothing left to fear. Once you know this then you can finally escape from being terrified of what is to come. It allows you to have a sense of peace. Lena wanted her mother to realize this. FDR's quote, "There is nothing to fear, but fear itself", I thought really connected with this chapter. Ying-ying needed to realize this so herself and her family could be at peace.
This chapter was told by a LIMITED NARRATOR. We were only given information by Lena St. Clair. Although she told her story well, we did not get to really see what Ying-ying, her father, and Teresa were thinking.
"She barricaded the door with a chain and two types of key locks. And it became so mysterious that spent all my energies unraveling this door..."(103).
