'your mother is in your bones

            Amy Tan's novel, The Joy Luck Club is one that is truly amazing and a joy to read. There are a number of issues at work in the novel, the most obvious one is the exploration of relationships between mothers and daughters. Unfortunately, for these four sets of mothers and daughters, there is not only a generational gap between them, but a cultural one as well.
             Daughters and Mothers in The Joy Luck Club Children, as they become adults, become more appreciative of their parents. In The Joy Luck Club, the attitudes of four daughters toward their mothers change as the girls mature and come to realize that their mothers aren't so different after all. As children, the daughters in this book are ashamed of their mothers and don't take them very seriously, dismissing them as quirky and odd. "I could never tell my father . . . How could I tell him my mother was crazy?" (p. 117). They don't try to comprehend their culture, which is a big part of understanding their traditional Chinese mothers. On page 6, one of the daughters states, "I can never remember things I don't understand in the first place," referring to Chinese expressions her mother used. When their mothers show pride in them, the girls only show their embarrassment. One daughter shows her shame when she says to her mother, "I wish you wouldn't do that, telling everyone I'm your daughter" (p. 101). The girls cannot relate to their mothers because they were raised in a .
             Mother-daughter Relations and Clash of Cultures in The Joy Luck Club Six Sources Amy Tan is an American Born Chinese, daughter of immigrants, and her family shares many features with the families depicted in her novels. Tan's novels offer some glimpses of life in China while developing the themes of mother-daughter relations, cultural adaptation and "women with a past". Tan's novels share many themes and elements, but this paper will focus mainly on two episodes of the novel The Joy Luck Club: "The Joy Luck Club" and "Waiting Between the Trees"; and will make references to The Kitchen's God Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses.