Previous
Tone
Part 3, Chapter 2: Four Directions
Explanation and Analysis—Just an Old Woman:
In a novel with as many different voices as those in The Joy Luck Club, disagreements and misunderstandings may be inevitable. Characters quibble, offer competing perspectives, and—in doing so—question their own narrative reliability. Feeling slighted by her mother, for instance, Waverly confronts Lindo Jong to talk about Rich in Part 3, Chapter 2. In the end, she merely confronts the limitations of her own perceptions:
‘Ai-ya, why do you think these bad things about me?’ Her face looked old and full of sorrow. ‘So you think your mother is this bad. You think I have a secret meaning. But it is you who has this meaning. Ai-ya! She thinks I am this bad!’
Lindo pleads with her daughter to cast aside her suspicions and misgivings. She complicates the credibility of Waverly’s perceptions as well. “I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword,” Waverly notices, pages later. Waiting patiently for “her daughter to invite her in,” Lindo really desires intimacy, not further feuding. Lindo suggests that Waverly has merely been assigning “secret meaning” to her gestures, seeing “bad things” where none actually exist. The chess genius may have projected her own insecurities upon her mother, battling with phantom adversaries the whole time.
This moment puts Waverly’s relations with her mother on the mend. It also points to the complexity of the novel’s intergenerational exchanges: limited by their own frustrations and desires, neither Waverly nor her mother fully grasp each other’s intentions. Their accounts get colored by misinterpretation and narrowed by perspective. “We are lost,” Ying-Ying writes of herself and her daughter, “unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.” Though mothers and daughters fail to fully see or hear, together they form a story that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Related Themes:
