Topic Presentation for The Joy Luck Club (No. A9517505~8)


Agenda

1. About the Author
2. Introduction to the Joy Luck Club
3. Characters of the Club
4. Summary
5. Reference
6. Question time


Author

Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. The Joy Luck Club was her first book. Much of the content of her books is autobiographical.

Tan blends Eastern and Western cultures, often by telling a “Chinese” story through“American”eyes and also feels confused about the two cultures.

Amy and her mother had fought throughout her childhood, and she was bent on rebelling in whatever way she could. She gradually began to realize that one of their problems was that she did not understand her mother.

Because she remembers her childhood as very unhappy, and cannot
be sure she would not make the same mistakes her mother made, so she decided not to have children.

When Amy became a successful writer, her mother took credit for her achievements. Though this is unfair to Amy, her mother’s life and personality have been providing her with her subject matter.

Those problems she has experienced made her to write books about mothers and daughters.




Characters of the Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club presents the stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American born daughters. The mothers are Suyuan, An-mei, Lindo, Ying-Ying. Their daughters are Jing-mei, Rose, Waverly, Lena respectively.

All the people you may forget quickly. So I like to tell a story to mention four of them, a key man and three other people. These people are Jing-mei (the main character), Jing-mei’s mother Suyuan, the aunt Lindo, and Lindo’s daughter Waverly.

In the Joy Luck, Suyuan and Lindo are best friend. But they are competitors too. Why do I say that? Their daughters, Jing-mei and Waverly, are the same age. They like to compare their daughters’ anything. In some aspects, Waverly is doing better than Jing-mei. So, Jing-mei’s mother always hope Jing-mei to do better. But this let Jing-mei lose her self-confidence in her life. Why? The most important event is that when Jing-mei was a primary school student. There was a party. The music player was Jing-mei. Jing-mei’s mother Suyuan, aunt Lindo, and Lindo’s daughter Waverly came to see her. Jing-mei thought that she can do something better than Waverly now. But in that party, Jing-mei’s performance was not good. This made Jing-mei nervous. And when she saw Waverly. Waverly’s eye seemed to tell that Jing-mei is a failure. Waverly was looking down her. So, she lost her self-confidence completely. She even hated her mother because she thought that Waverly was best and her mother must love Waverly more than she. She was pessimistic to do anything until her mother died and her aunts told her about her sisters in China. After listening to this, she stopped to hate her mother. She finally knew her mother always love her. She began to think her mother.

Aii-ya, what a shame. A lifetime of waiting. So, this story also tell us that if you hate your parents now, try to know them again.




The Joy Luck Club Introduction

• The Joy Luck Club presents the stories of four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters. Each of the four Chinese women has her own view of the world based on her experiences in China and wants to share that vision with her daughter. They began meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, and “say” stories. They call their gathering The Joy Luck Club.
• Nearly forty years later, one of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother’s lifelong wish - and the tragic way in which it has come true.
• Amy Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club to try to understand her own relationship with her mother. Tan’s Chinese parents wanted Americanized children but expected them to think like Chinese. Tan found this particularly difficult as an adolescent. While the generational differences were like those experienced by other mothers and daughters,
• the cultural distinctions added another dimension. Thus, Tan wrote not only to sort out her cultural heritage but to learn how she and her mother could get along better.
• Critics appreciate Tan’s straightforward manners as well as the skill with which she talks about Chinese culture and mother/daughter relationships. Readers also love The Joy Luck Club: women of all ages identify with Tan’s characters and their conflicts with their families, while men have an opportunity through this novel to better understand their own behaviors towards women. Any reader can appreciate Tan’s humor, fairness, and objectivity.




The Summary of The Joy Luck Club

Jing-mei’s mother, Suyuan, founded “The Joy Luck Club” in China during wartime, why did she found it? Because she knew she had a choice: she could either sit quietly and wait for death, which could come at any time, or she could take happiness where she could find it. Each week, they played mah jong, ate food, and hoped to be lucky. That hope was their only joy. So they called the club “Joy Luck”. Soon after she moved to America, she restarted the club with other three women.

The relationship of the four women and their daughters is full of sadness, anger and joy. For example, Suyuan’s daughter, Jing-mei, often thinks about how little she knew her mother. She knows she disappointed her mother all the time, and they were never able to completely accept and know each other. After her mother’s death, she learns that her mother’s other daughters have been found: they live in China, and the other women of The Joy Luck Club are sending her to meet them.

Why do the women of The Joy Luck Club send Jing-mei to see her sisters?
Because they see themselves and their daughters in Suyuan and Jing-mei, and it scares them. They want the best for their daughters: they want them to be Chinese and American. But they worry that the daughters have rejected their mothers’ ambitions for them, not caring about Chinese traditions and hating their mothers’ strange customs. Because the daughters sometimes felt like they weren’t Chinese at all, and didn’t know how to deal with the Chinese culture in their homes.

Even the wartime was hard; Suyuan still look on the bride side, she founded the club to inspire herself and her friends. Her behavior can teach us one thing - when we can’t change the circumstance, we should change our thought and our behavior. Complaining won’t help anything. We should look on the bride side and take a positive mission like Suyuan did.

In an immigration family, the relationship between parents and children is more complex than general family. The background of the parents is much different from their children, which make the communication getting harder. Parents want their children don’t forget where their parents came from, and pass on their tradition culture. But their children don’t understand and accept what their parents want, it causes many problems. From the article we can find a factor - when we are parents, we always want the best for our children, and add our ambition to them. We often forget to ask them what they really want, so if we could spend more time to know each other, the misunderstanding and problem will get less and relationship will get better.


Reference

1 " The Joy Luck Club”, by Amy Tan, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. 1989.
2 Movie “The Joy Luck Club”, Directed by Wayne Wang, 1993.
3 http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/joyluck/


Questions

1.Who founded the Joy Luck Club?
a. Amy Tan, or
b. Suyuan Woo, or
c. Jing-mei Woo

2.Where did the Club be founded?
a. China, or
b. USA

3.Who is the author of this novel?
a. Amy Tan, or
b. Suyuan Woo, or
c. Jing-mei Woo