By Tiffany Phan
Staff Writer
For myself and other second-generation Asian Americans, our parents’ well-intentioned expectations can be lost in translation. I feel pressured to fulfill these demands, and when I am unable to do so, I find myself stuck between being true to myself and making my parents proud. “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan weaves together a story of four Chinese mother-daughter pairs struggling to connect with one another, and as Thanksgiving rolls around, the themes of family and connection become more relevant.
I connected with two daughters: Jing-mei Woo and Waverly Jong. In Jing-mei’s family, her unwillingness to change by refusing to try any more than she already is, despite her mother’s demands, strains their mother-daughter relationship. While she believes that her actions are simply stating her boundaries, her mother sees it as laziness. Waverly is a chess prodigy and seemingly everything her mother would ever be proud of. However, her mother’s constant flaunting of her success and faulty advice only leads to conflict.
While the mother believes she is doing right by her child, it frustrates Waverly and she dismisses her mother as culturally backward. I connected with the two because though I long to be like Jing-mei, I am scared to put my foot down because I don’t trust myself to know what’s right. Like Waverly, I find too many flaws in the logic of my parents to blindly trust what they say. As a result, I’m stuck in a stalemate of warring emotions and thoughts that seem impossible to navigate without damaging our relationship. While I know my parents want the best for me, it’s difficult to blindly trust in their advice. “The Joy Luck Club” speaks to me as a daughter of immigrants because although I long to fully grasp the situations that shaped who they are now, I fear that I will never truly understand. Often, my parents and I argue over what they be-
lieve is best for me. I’m supposed to know myself best, but my parents’ view of who
I should be has left me confused as to who I really am. Though “The Joy Luck Club” represents the worst-case scenarios that could arise from confrontation on my end, it also serves as a reminder that eventually, it will be too late to do anything at all.
Tan shows the miscommunication and disconnect between the mother-daughter pairs. Their stubbornness to recognize the other point of view only adds to the lack of communication. It’s clear that both the mother and daughter want the best for each other. However, their different up-bringings turn a well-intentioned kindness into an offense. Tan reminds us that all our
experiences differ and that it is important to be understanding of where others are coming from.
I strongly recommend “The Joy Luck Club” for its accurate representation of the Asian diaspora in literature. I hope that second-generation Asian Americans like me can also find pieces of themselves within Tan’s writing and that those who have no connection to Asian culture
can develop an understanding of the circumstances we come from.