The major theme in the novel The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is the personal quest for identity that is made more difficult by the cultural diversity of all the characters. The conflict between the Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters proves to be the major obstacle in the accomplishment of "finding-oneself". Furthermore, the characters of the novel face great personal losses that distinctively alter their personalities. .
Ying-Ying St. Clair narrates how betrayal, personal loss and displacement affected her life and made her become a "ghost". At the age of sixteen, Ying-Ying is promised to become a wife of a rich man. Ying-Ying is not told about this but she already knows she would marry this man because she starts to know a thing before it happens. True enough, after some time Ying-Ying marries this man but surprisingly, she slowly grows to love this man and depend on him very much. Unfortunately, he leaves her to live with an opera singer and Ying-Ying, heartbroken and full of sorrow, intentionally aborts her child that she knew would be a boy. She decides to leave the house and moves in with her relatives. After ten years of "waiting between the trees", Ying-Ying decides to work in a store as a shop assistant. In that store, she meets her second husband Clifford, who is an American businessman. Again, Ying-Ying knows she will marry this man one day and after four years, when she gets a letter informing her about her first husband's death, she lets Clifford to marry her. She doesn't love him, nor she hates him because how can a ghost love? Can ghosts have feelings? .
All these events led to Ying-Ying's transformation into a ghost. She lives in her cousin's house and "waits between the trees". Ying-Ying refers to "waiting between the trees" as waiting for the right moment. Ying-Ying was born in the year of Tiger and so she has two sides, gold and black. "The gold side leaps with its fierce heart" (282), which means that, when the gold side is dominant, this person is strong and forceful.