Mother-Daughter relationships in the Joy Luck Cl1ub
...the war. She was very weak and she had no food to give them and she thought that she was not going to make it till the end of the war, but someone helped her and she survived, but never knew anything about her babies. Suyuan felt she had failed as a mother and also as a person. And this caused great deal of tension between her and her daughter Jing-Mei. Suyan was the head of the Joy Luck Club and when she died, without finding her daughters, Jing_Mei took her place in the club. By doing so, Jing-Mei’s story becomes related to all the others in the novel because she learns about the past of Ann-Mei, Ying-Ying and Lindo. Besides all these, Jing-Mei returns to China to look for her sisters, because that was her mother’s promise to the twins. In “A pair of Tickets” the very last section of the book, Jing-Mei talks about what she feels before she meets her two sisters. Before she leaves for China she talks to her father and he tells her about her mother and how she escaped from her country and left her two daughters on the rail. When she finally sees her two sisters, she realizes that they were as same as her mother. And the only thing she had left to do was tell them all about their mother, how she was and transfer what she had learned from her mother and her tradition. “Waiting between the Trees” tells the story of YingYing St.Clair when she recalls her childhood story, when she sees signs in her daughter’s house Lena. She recalls how her first marriage was, how she met her first husband and how it ended. It was a very tough experience for her because this man who she married subjugated her. He started going on trips and barely came back home. She had a son and because of her despair she killed her own son while she was bathing him. And all this because of the hater she felt for that man. Ying Ying was unable to love again. But she met Clifford St. Clair and Lena was a product of that relationship. As Ying-Ying was in her daughter’s house she realized how her relationship with Clifford was the same as the one Lena had with her husband, they were cold and distant. They had everything they wanted, material-wise but love was missing. But above all this, what was missing was closeness to her daughter. Ying Ying knew many things she had gone through, and she could notice those things in her daughter’s marriage, but they were not close enough to tell her what was going on and give her some advice. There was that tension between mother and daughter that did not allow them to be closer. Another story that has a life on its own is Rose Hsu Jordan and An-Mei’s one. In “Magpies” Rose’s marriage is falling apart and she is desperate and hopeless. She thinks she has no choice and she tells her mother, An-Mei and she immediately started remembering how her mother’s situation took place and precisely because they were raised in a Chinese way, where she was “taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery and eat my (her) own bitterness” (Tan, 241) An-Mei felt bad because she thought that she had raised her child in a different way, but she came out in the same way. As she thinks about this, she remembers her experience with her mother when she was forced to concubinage because her lack of power as a woman, where she had no voice. An-Mei’s mother became the third wife and she had very little status on the house. She could not handle the situation and she killed herself with an overdose of opium. As An-Mei thinks the situation over, she realizes her mother’s situation is the same as her daughter’s neither can save their live by themselves, because they did not speak and make a choice. At the end, Rose understands what her mother is trying to tell her, and forgets their discrepancies and stands up for herself and refuses to let Ted walk over her. The last conflictive relationship is between Waverly and Lindo Jong. They had a hard time getting along since Waverly was a young girl and she was a chess player. Lin...