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I. Introduction
Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California on February 19th, 1952. She is the second of three children. Amy Tan’s family is a typical immigrant family. Her father John Tan, who is an electrical engineer and Baptist minister, and her mother Daisy Tan are the first generation of immigrants great misfortune befell in Amy Tan’s family. At the age of 15, both her father and her older brother Peter died of brain tumors in the same year. Her mother decided to move the whole family to Switzerland, where Amy Tan finished her high school. Amy Tan received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and linguistics from San José State University, and later did doctoral linguistics studies at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. (Amy Tan. Wikipedia)
As a famous Chinese-American writer, she has written many books, such as The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) and Saving Fish from Drowning, a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings and two other children books The Moon Lady and Sagwa, and The Chinese Siamese Cat. Among these books, the most well-known one is her debut novel The Joy Luck Club. Amy Tan is good at portraying the mother-daughter relationship in immigrant families. The Joy Luck Club is spoken highly of the vivid description of mother-daughter relationship by the critics. Also, her own relationship with her mother is quite different from that of the common American style. Her own mother Daisy is like the mothers in this book. She porced her abusive former husband and left her three daughters in China. She went to the United States, married Amy Tan’s father and had three children, Amy Tan and her two brothers. At the same time, Amy Tan is like the other four girls in the novel. She was born in the United States and had an American mind. But she has a mother who lives in America but cannot live without her inner deep Chinese thoughts. It was quite difficult for her to communicate with her mother. What’s more, the mother tends to control her children in the Chinese way. For example, because Amy Tan gave up the universities her mother chose for her, her mother did not talk to her as long as six months. She couldn’t understand her mother until she went back to China with her mother in 1987. Thanks to this trip, the relationship between Tan and her mother changed a lot. This trip also gave her some inspirations to write her books.
Amy Tan won worldwide fame by this novel. It is such a big success. The Joy Luck Club had eight consecutive months topped the best-selling book of New York Times. And it has become one of the four U.S. bestsellers in 1989. Besides these awards, this story has been made into a successful movie and translated into 13 languages.
The whole novel can be pided into four sections. Each section is a story of a couple of mother and daughter. The conflicts between the mother and the daughter impress readers most. There are different kinds of conflicts between them. The older generation is Chinese. They move to America and expect their children to have the American style life instead of their miserable one. However, when their daughters grow up, it is difficult for them to communicate with their daughters. They wait and dream that one day their English would be improved and they could tell their daughters about what their mothers told them. But because of different cultural backgrounds and life experiences, they have had a lot of misunderstandings and distrusts with their daughters. And the small unhappiness has led them into conflicts.
The whole novel opens after the death of the founder of the Joy Luck Club Suyuan Woo. After her death, a secret of her was uncovered. She left two twin daughters in China and the twins were found by her relatives in China. She also had another daughter Jing-Mei in America. Jing-Mei was told by the other three members of the Joy Luck Club about this news and she was asked to go to China to see her half-blood sisters to fulfill her mother’s lifelong will. However, beyond everyone’s expectation, Jing-Mei said that she knew nothing about her mother and she didn’t have anything about her mother to tell her half-blood sisters. This question is like a door and gives the mothers a way to get their dissatisfactions on their daughters off their chest. Their daughters are like Jing-Mei, they all know very little about their mothers. While reading these lines, I cannot stop thinking that the mother Suyuan Woo is really sad. She has devoted all her love to her daughter Jingmei but her daughter cannot even understand her. Then the readers cannot help asking for the reasons. Then the writer begins to explain in the following chapters of the novel. The whole novel is separated into 16 chapters and every two chapters to tell a story.