Joy Luck Club

Joy Luck Club

This is an essay on the cultural conflicts as portrayed in the The joy luck club for Amy Tan. The name of the book is derived from the club started in China by one of the mothers known as Suyuan Woo so as to lift the spirits of her friends and divert them from their problems during the invasion of the Japanese. Suyuan Woo continued the club when she went to the United States with the hope of bringing good fortune to her family and friends and hence finding joy in that hope.  

The Joy Luck Club was written by Amy Tan with an aim of trying to understand her own relationship with her mother. The parents of Tan who were Chinese wanted Americanized children however they expected them to think like Chinese. When Tan was an adolescent, she found this particularly difficult. While the generational differences of Tan and her mother were similar to those experienced by other mothers and their daughters, the cultural differences added another aspect. This is a similar to the other daughters; they tried to understand and be grateful for the pasts of their mothers, adjust to the American culture, and they tried to win their mothers to accept them. Thus, Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club to help her sort out her cultural heritage and at the same time to learn how she and her mother could live happily. The conflict between the Chinese culture and the American culture; and feminism are examined according to The Joy Luck Club.

The mode of communication used is one way of understanding the difference that exists in these cultures. The Chinese culture can be categorized as a high-context culture and the American culture as a low-context culture (Rozakis 67).

Culture is the way of life that a set of people has developed and passes on from one generation to the subsequent. Culture consists of concepts, habits of thinking and acting, skills, arts, organizations, ways that relate to humanity, and agreeing on what is important and essential to know. It is out of culture that the following are created and derive their meanings: race, ethnicity, class and gender.

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