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Explanation and Analysis—Mother and Daughter:
The rifts between mother and daughter might be most deeply felt between Jing-Mei and Suyuan, who butt heads more often than they find common ground. Through this character foil of parent and child, Tan reveals different approaches to the American life.
Suyuan embodies the optimistic American dream more forcefully than any of her fellow Joy Luck Club members. “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America,” Jing-Mei recounts. Though Jing-Mei can only work with fragments of memories about her mother, she assembles a portrait of aspiration. Things can only “get better” for Suyuan, who founds her first Joy Luck Club in China to celebrate fortune amid circumstances so seemingly devoid of it. Upon arriving in America, she pushes her daughter towards outlandish competitions in pursuit of unlocking some secret talent. She demands that Jing-Mei is her “best.”
But Suyuan’s differences from Jing-Mei doom her aspirations from the very start. If she is wildly aspirational, then her daughter comes across as her unremarkable opposite. Jing-Mei defies her mother’s attempts to make her “perfect,” scrambling notes during piano lessons and dawdling through practice. She blunders her talent show performance, drops out of college, and gets cheated out of payment by Waverly Jong. “I won’t let her change me,” she swears to herself. Suyuan’s American ambition meets Jing-Mei’s equally stubborn American independence, her willingness to live on her own terms. One person’s aspirations become the cruel punishment of the other. And in a novel where mother-and-daughter pairs often repeat their fates, Jing-Mei and Suyuan offer a powerful instance of divergence.
Related Themes:
