Novel (Book)

Introduction

In the modern world with the increase of immigrant numbers, hybrid nations. And constitution of countries with different cultural diversities the question of identity came to the surface. As a result. Contemporary literature reflects social condition of immigrants in ‘America. Immigrants had to encounter hardship including poverty and unsafe when they migrated from their motherland to a new nation. Besides, there is also the hardship of new social condition that immigrants had to face: they needed to adjust their way of lives in order to survive in a multicultural variety within the new society. Furthermore, they encountered inner problem within ethnicity; especially, between first generation and later generations. It is possible that the later generations cannot accept the old way of life of the parents and are more accustomed to the new environment.

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is a novel that portrays the problems between two generations, mothers and daughters. Their conflicts are based on different cultural backgrounds. Mothers who were horn and grew up in the Chinese society have learnt inequalities and subservience in the Chinese family. They have been “planting filial piety and obedience to the descendants. In the novel, mothers represent the Chinese way of life; most of them had painful experiences in the past. In contrast, daughters were born and grew up in America where they have absorbed freedom and individualism. Furthermore, it is important for American people to have equality in leading their personal lives. The daughters illustrate the American way of life with their independence to make their own decisions. Because of such differences, characters in The Joy Luck Club who are from different backgrounds possibly have conflicts with each other. I shall begin by providing the definition of key terms like “mother-daughter relationship” and “identity formation”. I will then proceed with the theoretical

framework of this study where the object relations theory and personality development theory will be employed. Certain stages of each theory will be elaborated in detail.

“And then I realized that the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother’s breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. A mother is always the beginning.”

(Tan, 2001, p. 299)

Definition

Mother-daughter relationship, the mother- daughter relationship is defined as the connection that exists between a mother and daughter. Whether it involves a close or estranged bond, all daughters have an affiliation with their mothers to some extent. Day and Fisher asserted that previous research on mother-adult daughter relationships revealed that daughters possess a stronger desire to obtain support from mothers than sons. A mother daughter friendship exceeds other relationships because it integrates all the years spent intimately studying each other and learning to interpret each other’s behavior (Day and Fisher, 2010).

According to Hirsch,. The mother stays a crucial object throughout an adult daughter's life. Despite the many changes that occur in the relationship as the daughters enter midlife, some emotional qualities remain the same. Most mothers identify more strongly with: female infants because they view them more as extensions of themselves while boys are urged to become separate and independent (Hirsch, 1981. 206), Therefore, it is natural that mothers hold a strong influence when it comes to the identity development of their daughters.

Identity

Every person is branded with an identity. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, an identity basically refers to the distinguishing character or personality of an individual (Identity, 2011). This personality is unique to us alone and it is honed along the process of growing up. Identity development starts with an infant's discovery of self and continues throughout childhood before becoming the focus of adolescence (Identity Development - Aspects of Identity, 2010(.

Identity Formation. Ryckman stated that identity formation is a process where a person develops a distinct personality which is viewed as a persisting entity in a certain stage of life. It generally refers to a conscious sense of uniqueness and direction, derived from a variety of psychosocial experiences that are integrated by the ego (Ryckman, 2004, 182). These experiences include all of our previous identifications learned as a participant in a variety of groups (family, school and peer) and all our self-images. As we interact with these people, we may unconsciously incorporate certain parts of their behavior into our own.

Some researchers strongly emphasize the importance of early relationships in the development of adult self-perception and behavior. Alder described a set of individual differences that collectively formed as “style of life”. He stated that people’s characters are shaped through interactions with others. Factors like associated family roles form the scaffolding in which the child's style of life is developed (Alder, 1927). Two theories that appropriately explain the development of a child's character include the object relations theory and the personality development theory.

Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Kincaid’s Annie John can be examined from the perspective of the mother-daughter relationship where it plays a significant role in the identity formation of the daughters from childhood to adulthood. To analyze the selected novels, the current study uses the qualitative method that includes close reading, thematic and technical analysis whereas the theoretical framework encompasses the object relations theory and the personality development theory. For the object relations theory, the daughters undergo the stages of attachment, frustration and rejection before they can build stronger identities. For the personality development theory, the study focuses on the adolescence stage. The selected novels are analyzed in relation to how culture interferes with the daughters’ character development. They investigate how daughters struggle with their mixed heritage before coming to terms with it. This study is conducted as there is comparatively little research done on the mother-daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club and Annie John from the perspectives of these theories.

Chapter One

This chapter provides a biographical background of the two female novelists under consideration-: Amy Tan and Jamaica Kincaid, and some relevant critical views. It also addresses the formative influences, their contributions, and some impediments they encountered in their lives and works. Focusing predominantly on Tan's and Kincaid's life, this part is essential in understanding mother-daughter relationship in their novels.

Amy Tan: Life and Works

Born in Oakland, California, on February 19, 1952, Tan is the middle child of two Chinese immigrants: Daisy Du Ching and John Yuehan Tan. Her parents named her Amy Ruth Tan in English and An-mei in Chinese. It means "blessing from America" (Graham 559). It was a fitting choice for the only daughter of parents who had come to the United States from China in the late 1940s.

Tan is one of those lucky writers whose sources for fiction are derived from their loved ones. Amy's father, John Tan, the oldest child of twelve, was born in Beijing in 1913. He worked for the United States Information Service in China during World War II, and when the war terminated, he left China in 1947. At age thirty-four, he rejects a scholarship to study electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to pursue theology at the Berkeley Baptist Divinity School. He becomes a Baptist evangelist, as was the case with his eleven younger siblings. Tan's father was the model for Jimmy Louie in The Kitchen God's Wife (1991).

Her mother's life in China and America "has provided Tan with an intricately woven tapestry of women's lives that furnished characters, settings, conflicts, and

themes in all of her three novels" (Xu 366). Amy's mother, Daisy Tan, was born into a wealthy upper-class family in Shanghai in 1916. She had already endured a life replete with considerable tragedy and melodrama. Daisy's father died of influenza when she and her brother were young. Her mother Gu Jing-mei, a young and beautiful widow, had to raise her young children on her own. Jing-mei was forced to become a rich man's concubine after he raped her, thereafter becoming an outcast to her own family. Daisy spent a short time with her mother, living in the rich man's house. Jing-mei bore the rich man a son, who usually would guarantee security for the concubine. But when one of the rich man's favored concubines took the boy away and claimed him as her own.

Daisy's mother committed suicide by swallowing a lethal quantity of raw opium infused into a New Year cake. Daisy was nine years old by that time. Jing-mei's last words to Daisy were: "Do not follow my Footsteps" (Tan 2003: 102). Daisy was left to grow up with neither mother nor father, and eventually "Daisy's relatives raised her with sufficient material comforts, but she nonetheless grew up as a lonely girl" (Dong 2). She worked as a nurse in Shanghai for a short period of time before her marriage was arranged by her relatives. In 1935 when she was nineteen, Daisy was married to Wang Zo, a military man who was abusive to her. They had five children, three daughters who survived, along with a son and daughter who died in infancy. Daisy eventually abandoned Zo and their daughters when she fell in love with John Tan.

Daisy met John Tan during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). They fell in love at first sight but endured a four-year separation. Their brief love affair ended with Daisy's imprisonment upon a charge of adultery and John's voyage to the United States, brokenhearted. After two years in prison, Daisy gained her freedom and immigrated to the United States to marry John Tan. Daisy's tragic experiences

directly inspired the stories of the characters An-mei Hsu and Suyuan Woo in The Joy Luck Club and Winnie Louie in the The Kitchen God's Wife (Dong 2-3).

Tan's parents held high expectations for their children. Since kindergarten, Tan was required not only to achieve academic perfection but also to practice piano lessons after school. When Tan was five, they bought a piano so that she could begin piano lessons. When she was six, she was part of an education study conducted in Oakland, California. The psychologist who conducted the study concluded that Amy "was smart enough to become a physician" (Streitfield 3). Believing that the brain was the most important part of the body, her parents hoped that she would become a neurosurgeon. Tan summarized twenty years of her mother's instructions in three sentences: "First, if it is too easy, it is not worth pursuing. Second, you have to try harder, no matter what other people might have to do in the same situation-that is your lot in life. And if you are a woman, you are supposed to suffer in silence" (Kepner 59).

In third grade, Tan joined her father in a weekly library visit. She told how much she loved to read and how she enjoyed trips to the library with her father. She expressed her disappointment that the library had to be closed. She wrote "I missed it like a good friend" (Mandelbaum 418). A campaign was launched to raise funds for a new building. Part of the campaign was to have children write essays about what the library meant to them. Tan entered the contest. At the age of eight, Tan won first prize in her elementary school for her essay, "What the Library Means to Me." In her essay, she described the library as "her friend and even made a pitch for money, prompting people to contribute to their local libraries" (Mussari 13). Her own contribution was her life's savings of seventeen cents. She won a transistor radio and publication of her essay in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

Under enormous pressure and moving frequently from one place to another, Tan suffered from loneliness and a strained relationship with her mother in childhood. She found her salvation in books and often turned to them for comfort and joy. In The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, Tan identified books as "windows opening and illuminating my room" (Tan 1). Her father shared his sermons with her by reading them aloud and asking if there were any words that need explanation. She benefited from her father's storytelling ability. Even as a child, Tan had a wild imagination and was attracted to gruesome, gothic tales from Bible stories to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. In her introduction to The Best American Short Stories1999, Tan recalled: "I was addicted to stories about the morbid: the beheadings, the stonings, the man who was dead for three days and stank when he came back to life. These were people with fates worse than mine" (2003: 341).

Tan began reading more intellectual library books, including Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie Books and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. She also read two forbidden books of J.D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and Richard von Krafft-Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). She began to read more and more, at times finishing a book a day. Tan said: "I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character" ("Academy of achievement"). Tan later developed a strong love of free speech and intellectual liberty and a hatred of book banning because Tan:

grew up in a house filled with storytelling-especially among her mother and her aunts. At family gatherings, the older women frequently gossiped and wove tales about the life they left behind in China. Although she did not

know it at the time, these stories would eventually play an influential role in much of Tan's fiction. (Mussari 13)

When Tan turned fifteen, her elder brother and her father died from malignant brain tumors just a few months apart in 1967 and 1968. Peter was only sixteen and John, fifty- four. The family was falling apart, so Tan described the years later as "just kind of went to pieces" (Marvis 78). Tragedy in Tan's family greatly increased her sense of loss and confusion. After this immense tragedy, Daisy Tan insisted on moving again, leaving California in 1968 and eventually settling with Tan and her younger brother, John, in Montreux, Switzerland.

Daisy Tan might have believed that the move would help her family to come to terms with their tragedy, but in Switzerland, Tan rebelled against her mother and everything she stood for. At age sixteen, Tan became involved with a twenty-four- year-old German man who had an illegitimate child. There were rumors that the young man had connections with drug dealers. When Tan was with the man's drug- dealing friends, she started drinking and smoking. Daisy Tan decided to find out the truth about him. She hired a private detective who discovered that the rumors were true. After being arrested, Amy woke up and realized she had slipped too far. She broke off her relationship with the man and his friends and refocused her energies on school.

In 1969, Tan graduated from the Institut Monte Rosa Internationale, a private boarding school in Montreux, Switzerland. Tan, her mother, and brother then returned to San Francisco. Tan enrolled in Linfield College, a conservative Baptist school in McMinnville, Oregon. She first majored in pre-med studies. Later Tan transferred first to San Jose City College and then to San Jose State University to be closer to her Italian American boyfriend, Louis M. DeMattei. When she first

met him, Tau thought: "This is the kind of person my father was" ("Academy of achievement"). They were well suited to one another. Daisy Tan was disturbed by this change and also by the fact that Tan changed her major from pre-med to a double major in English and linguistics. For years. Daisy Tan had dreamed that one day her daughter would become a doctor. In an interview with Streitfield of the Washington Post. Tan talked about her mother's reactions: "I remembered her saying something about how disappointed my father would be... If I said I was going to be a physicist, or president of a bank, it would have been different. But I said I was going to be an English major. She could see nothing in that as a future" (4). Tan's decisions were so distressing to Daisy that they did not speak to one another for the next six months.

Tan received her bachelor's degree in English and linguistics from San Jose State University in 1973. She went on to earn an M.A. degree in linguistics from the same university in 1974. In the same year Tan married Louis, who was studying law. He later became a tax attorney. Tan started working on her doctorate in linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. She supported herself on proceeds from her work at the Round Table Pizzeria in San Jose. The doctorate of philosophy (Ph.D.) is the highest honor a student can earn. Daisy Tan might get to see the word "doctor" in front of her daughter's name after all.

Another tragic event had a profound effect on Tan's life in 1976, when a close friend, named Pete, a bioengineering student who worked with disabled children, was tortured and strangled to death by intruders. Sadly enough, the brutal murder occurred on Tan's twenty-four birthday. The names of the two killer-thieves were revealed "four days before the police apprehended them, she remained involved in the case, identified the body and items taken, and testified at the trial"(Snodgrass 13). The loss left her badly shaken. For the next seven years, Tan lost her voice

every year on her birthday "i thought it was laryngitis the first year, then when it happened the second year and the third year, I knew it was probably psychosomatic" ("Amy Tan Interview" 13). During this difficult time, Tan stated that her dead friend Pete appeared frequently in her dreams and often offered advice to her.

After this incident, Tan decided to change her life path and left the doctoral program. She realized that "I would have to do something with my life, not just be a student"(Pearlman and Henderson 17). She got a job with the Alameda County Association for Retarded Citizens, working as a language consultant for disabled children. Tan viewed this period, between her friend's death and her decision to change the course of her life, as a time of important personal growth. Tan observed "It pushed me, enlarged my outlook, and sent me searching for what I should believe in" (2003: 59). In the meantime, Tan's career as a language consultant was moving forward. She served as director of a San Francisco project for developmentally handicapped children. In her book, Reading Amy Tan, Lan Dong has divulged on the importance of Tan's job in the future:

Even though Amy was not aware of it at the time, this work experience was valuable later for her life as a writer because she had the opportunity to work with many families with handicapped children and gained priceless knowledge about different kinds of people, families, and relationships. (5)

Tan soon discovered that she did not like administrative work. So. She quit because she became fed up with being appointed to multiple governmental councils and task forces in order to be the voice for all minorities. She began working for a company that published an educational newsletter for doctors, called

"Emergency Room Reports" (now Emergency Medicine Reports). She started out as a reporter, later became a managing editor and then associate publisher.

Tan left her position at "Emergency Room Reports" in 1983 and began her own business as a freelance technical writer. She later wrote "I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management" (Oates 200). In the next few years, she produced pamphlets, manuals, and business proposals for companies like AT&T, IBM, and Bank of America. At the beginning, Tan had only a few small clients, but her skill at handling different kinds of business writing quickly earned her recognition in the field. She wanted her clients to understand that she was American, not Chinese, so she did not use her own name for her writing. Instead, she used a non-Asian pseudonym, May Brown (Kramer 32-33).

Tan's friends called her a "workaholic" (Somogyi and Stanton 27) but Tan did not agree. She thought workaholics put in long hours because they enjoyed what they were doing. Unfortunately, her success and stable income did not bring happiness to her life. The price she paid for her business-writing career was long, demanding working hours and a consequent depression that devoured her life and health. During this period in her life, "Tan became a self-proclaimed workaholic and suffered from stress-related problems" (Mussari 20).

So, Tan began sought to change her life. She started by seeing a psychiatrist. That strategy ended abruptly when she discontinued the sessions after her psychiatrist fell asleep three times while she was talking to him: "I would talk about feeling good, and he would fall asleep. But if I recalled something from my childhood that was traumatic, and I was crying, he was very attentive. And I

thought. he is reinforcing me to be unhappy" (Streitfield 3). When therapy did not help her: Tan turned to playing jazz piano, reading literature, and then to writing fiction and joining a writer's group. In her book, Amy Tan, Author of The Joy luck Club, Barbara Kramer observes: "Amy Tan's experience as a business writer gave her a good foundation in the basics of writing. It taught her about meeting deadlines and writing clearly...[So] She began what turned out to be a two-year apprenticeship in writing fiction" (35). Tan started her apprenticeship by reading the works of a number of women writers, including Isabel Allende, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, Amy Hempel, Eudora Welty, Alice Adams, Alice Walker, Anne Tyler, Jamaica Kincaid, Molly Giles, and Louise Erdrich. Tan later met Amy Hempel, who was very encouraging and gave her helpful advice for a beginning writer.

Although Tan's reading included some male authors, she preferred women writers because she identified more with them (Kramer 35). In particular, the Native American family tales portrayed in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1984) had a profound influence on her. As Snodgrass points out in her book Amy Tan: a Literary Companion: "Tan was amazed at the richness of Louise Erdrich's Love 'Medicine, a suite of interlinking Native American stories drawn from a single family. It became the impetus to Tan's career in family-oriented fiction" (15). Erdrich's novel helped Tan to realize that perhaps she, too, could compose a collection of stories linked by a sense of community. Tan also says she was "amazed by her [Erdrich's] voice. It was different and yet it seemed I could identify with the powerful images, the beautiful language and such moving stories" (Feldman 24). At the time, she did not realize that these readings would change her life path in a dramatic way.

In 1986, Tan published her first short story "Endgame" as a piece about a Chinese chess prodigy who has a difficult relationship with her strong-willed and overbearing mother. Tan's short story "Endgame", later retitled "Rules of the Game" earned her a pass to join the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, directed by the novelist Oakley Maxwell Hall, author of The Art and Craft of Novel Writing (1989) and How Fiction Works (2000). In "Endgame," Tan attempted something new: she made the main character, a young girl, and her mother Chinese Americans. When she finished the story, Tan realized that, although the events were fictional, the relationships resembled her own life. Tan recalls, "It was a magic turning point for me... [and] I realized that was the reason for writing fiction... to me, fiction became a process of discovering what was true for me. Only for me" ("Academy of Achievement"). This story was later incorporated into her debut novel The Joy Luck Club. It was published in FM Five Magazine and later reprinted in Seventeen.

The story has also been used as a sample short story for English, writing, and literature classes to teach students critical thinking and writing skills. Initially hoping to learn about writing techniques and character development in the Squaw Valley workshop, Tan did not realize at the time how much this experience would benefit her future career as a fiction writer. At the workshop, described by Tan as "intensely emotional, exhilarating" (Feldman 24), Tan met her friend and mentor Molly Giles. Giles had just won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for 1989, Tan found a valuable critic in Giles who questioned various aspects of Tan's early writing, such as her choice of authorial voice and her use of multiple story lines. At one point. Giles reads one of Tan's stories and tells her: "You do not have one story here, you have twelve stories. Sixteen stories" ("Academy of achievement"). Giles then helped her to revise "Endgame". After this workshop,

Molly Giles led another Writers' Workshop in San Francisco that continued to provide a nourishing environment for new writers like Amy Tan.

Tan also acquired a literary agent. Sandra Dijkstra, who had read her first published short story. Dijkstra believed in Tan's writing ability before Tan did. Tan said: "I told her, when she said she wanted to be my agent.' I'm not really a fiction writer. I do not need an agent" ("Academy of achievement").

Dijkstra wanted to see what else Tan had written, so Tan sent her a copy of her second story, "Waiting between the Trees". She also sent a note explaining that she was thinking about expanding the story into a novel. So, Dijkstra agreed to become Tan's agent. The partnership would prove to be significant, not just for writer and the agent but also for American fiction. When Tan sent Dijkstra a third story, said, "I think we are ready to sell a book" (Pearlman and Henderson 18). She asked Tan to put together a formal proposal for a book of interrelated short stories. The proposal was to include a summary of each of the stories. Tan sent the book proposal to her agent in July 1987. At that time, the title of her book was Wind and Water.

In 1987, Tan experienced another major turning point in her life when she traveled with her mother to China. Daisy Tan had been quite sick before this trip. She suffered a heart attack in 1985. That was when Amy Tan decided she needed to learn more about her mother and her mother's past. Tan told the "Academy of achievement" in 1996: "Most importantly, I wanted to know about her past. I wanted to see where she had lived, I wanted to see the family members that had raised her, the daughters she bad left behind. The daughters could have been me or I could have been them" ("Academy of achievement"). So much of that past had occurred in China where her mother had been born and lived until 1949. Tan

promised herself that if her mother pulled through, she would take her to visit China.

After Tan's mother recovered, they began their trip. "[This trip] was a chance for me to really see what was inside of me and my mother" ("Academy of achievement"). More importantly, the trip opened Tan's eyes to the world of her parents' generation and to the family she knew existed had never met in China. Visiting the three half-sisters she had only heard of, and whom her mother had abandoned, Tan felt a close family bond. Tan said. "There was an instant bond [And] the' way they smiled, the way they held their hands, all those things connected me. I had family in China. I belonged" (Hubbard and Wilhelm 150). Yet, she was also saddened to see how controlled her half-sisters' lives were in China. Her interest in their life stories would serve as another inspiration for her writing.

In China, Tan also became more aware of being American and of being Chinese, at the same time. In China, she discovered not only her roots-but her future. Tan told the New York Times in a 1989 interview "When my feet touched China, I became Chinese" (Lew 21). Tan felt connected to China, and she was a part of its history. She understood its importance and relevance, whereas previously she had felt Chinese history was rather irrelevant. These realizations helped lay the foundation for the stories that made up her first novel.

Additionally, Tan saw her mother from a new perspective. Perhaps most importantly, she began to understand her mother much better. She was surprised to discover that her mother became involved in as many misunderstandings and arguments in China as she did in the United States. "[I]n China, Tan saw that her mother remained not just her aggressive self but that she produced the same sort of

reactions that she got in the United States" (Loos 7). Back in the United States, Tan had been embarrassed by her mother, who often appeared pushy, annoying, and insensitive. Frequently, Tan's mother would have confrontations with people. Tan had attributed these confrontations to her mother's poor English and to cultural differences between the Chinese and American women.

Similarly, Tan observed her half-sisters being distressed by their mother's comments not only her comments to others, but to themselves. For instance, Daisy Tan made critical comments about her daughters' cooking and appearances. Her daughters as well as Tan expected love, support, and warmth and instead were upset to repeatedly experience something quite different toward their mother. Because of Tan's journey to China, she came to realize that her mother really did want the best for all her daughters, even if she had an unconventional way of showing it.

After Tan's return from China, she received a pleasant surprise. Dijkstra (her agent) informed her that the publisher G.P. Putnam's Sons was willing to pay Tan a $50.000 advance to write her first novel. She abandoned her commercial freelance writing work and became a full-time fiction writer. She turned to writing every day in her study in the basement, listening to the Japanese music of kitaro, and burning incense sticks to create an atmosphere "that spurred her imagination and helped her focus her mind on the task at hand" (Darraj 60). Tan wrote the other thirteen stories and finished the whole book within a few months.

The Joy Luck Club was published in 1989. Its immediate success surprised many, including Tan herself. Tan promoted her first novel with book signings, book club lunches, speeches, and lectures on College Campuses. Of her notoriety among academics, she remarked in The Opposite of Fate that "the word author is

as chilling as rigor mortis, and I shudder when I hear myself introduced as such" (7) Tan's well-received first book enabled her to enter the American literary landscape as a rising star. Comments were used by authors to promote The Joy Luck Club. As Louis Erdrich wrote on the book jacket of The Joy Luck Club "Amy effortlessly mixes tenderness and bitter irony, sorrow and slicing wit. The Joy Luck Club is a fabulous concoction" (qtd in Darraj 62). For Tan, writing The Joy Luck Club was an exploration of the tensions and bonds she and her mother experienced for years "When I was writing, it was so much for my mother and myself" (Lew 23). The Joy Luck Club won an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults award, Bay Area Book Reviewers prize, and Commonwealth Club gold citation as nominations for the Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a National Book Critics Circle's Best Novel. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and a literary selection for the 1992-1993 Academic Decathlon, a national scholastic competition for high school students.

In the wake of Tan's first success came a second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, published in 1991. In 1992, Tan went on a different path writing a children's book, The Moon Lady. In 1994, Tan published another children's book titled The Chinese Siamese Cat. By 1995 Tan published her next novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, which received mostly favorable reviews. It focused on many of the themes of her earlier titles, yet also delved into the supernatural and fantasy. Tan's next project was a novel entitled The Bonesetter's Daughter and published in 2001. In 2003, Tan took yet another route with writing, publishing The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, a collection of her own perspectives on life. In 2005, in her book, Saving Fish from Drowning, Tan abandoned her familiar topics concerning mother-daughter relationships and cultural and generational differences. Instead, she told the story of a group of vacationers. Some thought the book was funny and

that it had engaging characters; others thought it silly at times and that its characters were stereotypes. In addition, she has collaborated in writing a screenplay, a stage play script, and an opera libretto, and is the author of several essays and short stories:

Two highly regarded essays on language-"the language of Discretion" (1990) and "Mother Tongue" (1991)-focus on the connections between ethnic identity and language, providing for readers a cultural and theoretical background for Tan's fiction as well as for the works of other writers of non- Western ancestry. (Huntley 11)

She appears frequently in interviews on radio and television programs, and gives speeches and talks around the country and abroad. She is certainly one of the most popular contemporary American writers.

As a writer, Tan continues to explore new territories after the overwhelming success of her debut novel. In her words, Tan explained this saying: "I kept searching for this thing. this click that would make me feel I had finally done enough-either the right project or working hard enough or earning enough money or feeling that I had written the best thing" (Somogyi and Stanton 27).

Chapter Two

Theoretical Background: Object Relations Theory and Personality Development Theory

This chapter provides a theoretical framework of the object relations theory and the personality development theory. This part also sheds light on Erik Erikson's life, works and the people who influenced him, to give a glimpse of ego psychology, and the epigenetic principle. Also, all of Erikson's eight stages are briefly reviewed to illustrate their relationships to the identity crisis of adolescence.

Major Tenets of Object Relations Theory

Object relations theory is an offspring of Freud's theory, but it differs from it in at least three general ways. First, object relations theory places less emphasis on the drivers of aggression and sexuality and more importance on interpersonal relationships. Second, as opposed to Freud's paternalistic theory that emphasizes the power control of the father, object relations theory tends to be more maternal, stressing the reciprocal, mutually influential nature of the relationship between mother and infant. Third, object relations theorists suggest that people are motivated primarily for human contact rather than for sexual pleasure (Feist 139).

There are two main developments within object relations theory' which should be highlighted. It is pioneered by British psychologists W.R.D. Fairbairn, D.W.Winnicott, Melaine Klein and others in the 1940s and 1950s. It is also developed in the USA, with analysts such as Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Honey. Erich Fromm and others, Ronald Fairbairn is the first to officially use the term

"object relations theory" in 1952. But in Object Relations Theory: Key Concepts, Klee states:

[Sigmund] Freud originally used the term "object" to mean anything an infant directs drives toward for satiation and defines two types of drives: libidinal and aggressive...however, many theorists such as Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Jacobson, Kernberg and Khout have moved, in varying degrees, toward a relational / structural model of the psyche...[where] an "object" is the target of relational needs in human development.

Object relations theory is a psychoanalytic theory which centers on human relationships. This theory is more inclined towards the relationships within a family, especially between a mother and her child. The basic idea behind object relations theory is that people are motivated to establish successful relations with others and the failure to do so will lead to problems later in life. The concept of object can consist of people like a mother, father, or things like transitional objects to which an attachment is established. Klee says "it is through our relationships with the significant people around us that we take in parts of others (objects) and słowly build a self-structure, which we eventually call a personality" (Klee, Key Concepts).

According to Marshall, the concept of object refers to the people with whom a subject is involved emotionally. Disturbances during the maturing process lead to a pathological delay of the developmental sequence. In Object Relations Theory: Human Development und Psychopathology, Klee concludes, as a result, the child fails to mature emotionally and does not have the ego strength required to maintain healthy relationships. A person generally goes through three stages in life. These stages are attachment, frustration, and rejection (Riso and Hudson 315).

The object relations theory has three fundamental effects that can exist between the self-object and the other object. These effects include attachment, frustration, and rejection. They are universal emotional states that are the crucial building blocks of a person's identity. Further, they are also mutually dependent which means having one is to have them all ("Q & A on object relations").

Attachment refers to the desire of the ego to sustain a comfortable and stable relationship with people or things with which they identify. People of this category have trouble with attachments that are deeply held with people, situations or states that are "working" for them. Some tend to alter their self-image to become more acceptable and be appreciated by others. Others learn to become attached to a comfort zone which they associate with independence and freedom ("Q & A on object relations").

According to Riso and Hudson, people of the frustration stage feel that their comfort and needs are not being sufficiently taken care of. The self is described as “hungry" and there are traits like being uncomfortable or dissatisfied. Some people of this group are aggravated that their parents have not properly guided them and involuntarily expect others to defend and nurture them (317).

In the rejection stage, the self is viewed as weak and potentially victimized while others are considered powerful, abusive and rejecting. People of this stage expect to be rejected anytime, and thus they protect themselves in various ways. They often hide their own actual needs and vulnerabilities, employing some ability to defend themselves against further rejection. They also feel that they must have a particular skill so valuable to others that they will never be rejected (Riso and Hudson 317).

The concept of object relations theory has many meanings, just as there are many object relations theorists. This chapter discusses briefly the theories of Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Margaret Mahler, and finally Winnicott.

5-Adolescene: Identity versus Role Confusion/Fidelity

Adolescence is a stage that runs from roughly 12 or 13 years to about 20 years of age. This is the stage which Erikson presents more elaborately than any other stage of development because of his theoretical interest in adolescence and the problems accompanying it. The adolescent is no longer a child and is not an adult either. At this stage, the adolescent asks him / herself the question "who am I?" or more elaborately "what should or could be my role in life and what roles would I like to develop into?" (Pennington 102). During adolescence, young people are exploring their independence and developing a sense of self.

Identity is defined both positively and negatively. Positively, it consists of the things we are, the things we want to become and the things we are supposed to become. Negatively, it consists of the things which we do not want to be. For Erikson, the basic patterns of identity must emerge from two sources: "(1) adolescents' affirmation or repudiation of childhood identifications, and (2) their historical and social contexts" (Feist 257). Young people reject the standards of their elders, preferring instead the values of a peer group.

Also, the society in which adolescents live plays an influential role in shaping their identities. Here, Erikson emphasizes the ego identity which means knowing who you are and how you assimilate into the rest of society. The ego identity then becomes "the accrued confidence that the inner sameness and continuity prepared in the past are matched by the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for others, as evidenced in the tangible promise of a "career" (Erikson 1963: 261-62).

During adolescence, life gets more complicated when adolescents attempt to find out their own identities and struggle with social interactions. It is common to experience an identity crisis at this stage where a moratorium occurs. A

moratorium is a period between childhood and adulthood, in which people are exploring alternative identities without having yet made a commitment. During this period, individuals attempt to solve special problems. If these problems are not solved properly, role or identity confusion emerges. Feist defines it as "a sense of time urgency, a lack of concentration on required tasks, and a rejection of family or community standards" (258). Identity confusion is the absence of identity where people cannot see who they are clearly.

The basic strength emerging from adolescence crises is fidelity or faith in one's ideology, which Erikson called "the ability to sustain loyalties freely pledged in spite of the inevitable contradictions of value systems" (1964: 125). Adolescents are no longer in need of parental guidance but have confidence in their own religious, political and social ideologies. Identity, during infancy, begins to sprut, and continue to grow through childhood, the play age, and the school age:

The trust learned in infancy is basic for fidelity in adolescence. Young people must learn to trust others before they can have faith in their own view of the future. They must have developed hope during infancy, and they must follow hope with the other basic strengths-will, purpose, and competence. Each is a prerequisite for fidelity, just as fidelity is essential for acquiring subsequent ego strengths. (Feist 258)

The core pathology of fidelity is role repudiation. Role repudiation can appear in the form of either diffidence or defiance. Diffidence is an extreme lack of self- confidence and is expressed as shyness or hesitancy to express oneself. "Some amount of role repudiation, Erikson believed, is necessary, not only because it allows adolescents to evolve their personal identity, but also because it injects some new ideas and vitality into the social structure" (Feist 259).

Finally, the object relations theory and personality development theory will be incorporated to clarify the circumstances that exist between mother and daughter. This combination will benefit students of literature in offering them different angles of looking at the selected novels by Tan and Kincaid, by applying these two theories. For the object relations theory, the daughters undergo the stages of attachment, frustration and rejection before they can build stronger identities. For the personality development theory, only the adolescence stage is highlighted.

Chapter Three

Mothering as a Transition in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

This chapter attempts to explore. thematically and technically, how mothers play a crucial role in determining the identity formation of their daughters, from childhood to adulthood, from the perspectives of the object relations theory and the personality development theory in order to clarify the circumstances that exist between mothers and daughters. The Joy Luck Club is the story of four immigrant Chinese mothers and their four American-born daughters. The mothers, who have experienced war and famine back in China, find themselves suffering from cultural alienation in America. The daughters, on the other hand, who are facing uncertainty in relationships, are middle aged women. This chapter primarily aims to examine and analyze the relationship between four couples of mothers and daughters: Suyuan Woo and her daughter Jing-mei or June, An-mei Hsu and her daughter Rose Hsu Jordan, Ying-ying St Clair and her daughter Lena St Clair, and Lindo Jong and her daughter Waverly Jong.

A question that emerges here is: What is the function of the four section parables from Tan's perspective? Or why Tan employs these metaphorical tales that are told by unknown narrators? Each of the four sections starts with a parable or a prologue that discloses the reasons for the tensions and conflicts in the mother -daughter relationship in general and also summarizes the theme of each section in particular. In the first section, "Feathers from a Thousand Li Away" the parable begins with a tale of an old woman who remembers buying a swan from a vendor while still in Shanghai. The swan, according to the vendor, has actually once been a duck which had managed to stretch its neck in the hope of becoming a swan, In America, the swan is taken from the old woman who is left with only one of the

swan's feathers. As Gloria Shen points out "the swan and the old woman who sailed across the ocean together, "stretching their necks toward America"(17), are an emblem of the four mothers who came to the United States, hoping to give their daughters a better life than the one they had in China"(7). Furthermore, the prologue ends with these poignant words "and she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English." That is to say that the old woman has to wait patiently until she can speak to her daughter in perfect English in order not only to give her daughter a swan's feather but also to tell her "This feather may look worthless, but it comes from a far and carries with it all my good intentions" (JLC 17). Ironically, the daughter becomes so Americanized and she speaks only English, whereas the mother speaks only Chinese. So, cultural and linguistic barriers prevent them from communicating. Additionally, what is the solution for this problem? According to Tan, The mothers use storytelling as an attempt to bridge these gaps. Therefore, the feather is a symbol of the Chinese culture. Like the old woman who "is condemned to wait patiently many years until the daughter is finally mature enough to come back to her, appreciate her" (Shen 7), the four mothers also have to wait until their daughters become adults to appreciate their Chinese heritage,

For Tan, the feather is also a symbol of hope; so, the title of this chapter can be interpreted as "hope from a thousand li away." Hope is the value that is highly esteemed in the Chinese culture where "hopes for children are considered as a responsibility of parents" (Yin 163). Therefore, Suyuan is just like the old woman who envisions having a successful daughter. Suyuan's plan is to make her daughter a successful pianist.

The study points out how Tan cleverly uses the opening parable of the second section "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates" to serve as both simile and symbolic

devices in reinforcing themes of conflict and rebellion between children and parents-especially between mother and daughter-which dominate the novel in general and this section in particular, and also results in frustration for the mothers who believe that their daughters do not obey them and rebel against them. It is essential to explain the conflict between a mother and her little girl. Telling her seven-year-old-daughter not to ride her bicycle around the corner a way from home, the mother attempts to warn her of the dangers that can befall her outside her home: these dangers are mentioned in a book called the "The Twenty. Six Malignant Gates [which] is written in Chinese" (JLC 87) and therefore it is difficult for the daughter to grasp it as her mother explains. Perhaps, the book symbolizes the experience, the wisdom and the culture of the mothers who desire to pass on to their daughters. When the daughter insists on knowing what the twenty bad things are, and her mother refuses to provide a reason for her demands of certain tenets, the girl becomes angry. Thus, she runs out of the home, ride her bicycle and falls before she reaches the corner; this is a consequence of not listening to her mother. Riding the bicycle is a symbol of "the escape that all daughters must make from their mothers" (Rozakis 15). The simile device is depicted here when Tan makes a comparison between the little girl and all the daughters in attemping to defy the mothers by finally refusing to listen to them, and the most notable example in this section is Waverly Jong.

What Tan wants to convey and explain to the reader in the preface of the third section "American Translation" is the symbol of specifically positioning the mirror which illuminates the distance, then reconciliation, between mother and daughter. In a sense, this section partially throws light on the contrast between the mother's traditional views and the daughter's American ones: a mother who believes superstitiously that if a mirror has been placed at the foot of the daughter's bed,

"all (her] marriage happiness will bounce back and turn the opposite way" ( JLC 147). This is according to the Chinese tradition that mirrors are "regarded as symbols of a long and happy marriage" (Walters 55), and on this basis the mirror is significant for the mother because she forsees the future when she looks into it. But from the daughter's perspective, she can see only her own reflection in this mirror. As a result, the daughter who is the offspring of American tradition is annoyed and "irritated that her mother sees bad omens in everything. She had heard these warnings all her life" (JLC 147). These different views of both mother and daughter result in the conflict that is portrayed by Tan who "uses the contrast between the mothers' and daughters' beliefs and values to show the difficulties first-generation immigrants face in transmitting their native culture to their offspring" (Hamilton 65). Consequently, the mirror is a symbol of distance between mother and daughter.

To remedy the problem, the mother gives her daughter a second mirror as "housewarming present" to hang above the bed. The mother comments "this mirror see that mirror- haule!-multiply your peach-blossom luck" (JLC 147). According to the mother, the new position of the mirror will bring her daughter luck and fertility. When the daughter questions what peach-blossom luck alludes to, the mother answers pointing, to the mirror, "in this mirror is my future grandchild" (JLC 147). The mother's claim that her future grandchild is visible in the mirror may be true: just as the daughter will be a reflection of her own mother, the grandchild also will be a reflection of the daughter as the daughter finally affirms the mother's words with this sentence "there it was: her own reflection looking back at her" (JLC 147). These words reflect the theme of heritage which Tan highlights by linking past to present. In this case, the mirror is a symbol of the mother's deep love for her daughter, of reconciliation. The theme of this section, particularly superstition, on

the part of the mother, is revealed in the relationship between Lena St. Clair and Ying-ying St. Clair.

What is the main target of the last parable "Queen Mother of the Western Skies?" or what connection is there between the grandmother in the parable and the four mothers in the novel? It is essential to give a glimpse at this story in order to help the reader understand the simile device used by Tan. The story revolves around a grandmother who observes her granddaughter laughing, remembering that "[She] was once so free and innocent" (JLC 213). Later, she sheds her innocence to protect herself and she has taught her daughter the same lesson. She wonders now "was this kind of thinking wrong" (JLC 213) because she now sees the evil in the world. The grandmother compares the laughter of the granddaughter to the "Queen Mother of the Western Skies" to whom she resorts to provide her with some answers to her question: "Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever" (JLC 213). In a sense, the grandmother hopes that her own daughter and also her granddaughter will be able to laugh and live with hope. Like the grandmother in the parable who wants the best for her daughter owing to the corrupted bitterness of her life, all of the four mothers who have experienced horrible things during their life times and see evil in everything, try to teach their daughters a valuable lesson: not to lose innocence and never lose hope and to always be able to laugh forever. In other words, they also want their own daughters to have a better life. The relationship between An-mei Hsu and Rose Hsu Jordan is the most striking example in this section.

Suyuan Woo and Jing-mei

It is necessary to shed light on two important topics in order to explain how miscommunication leads to a strained relationship between Suyuan and Jing-mei. The combination of these two topics is urgent to the reader's comprehension of the theme and how this affects Jing-mei's character formation later on. The first topic is concerned with Suyuan's past life in China, concealed from Jing-mei for years. This is due to Suyuan's fear that Jing-mei misinterprets her actions and accuses her of being a had woman. The second one deals with two points: firstly, who is the originator of the Joy Luck Club? Secondly, what is the significance of the Joy Luck Club?

Born in China, Suyuan is first married to Wang Fuchi, an officer with the Kuomintang and has twin girls named Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa. When the Japanese troops invade China during World War II. Fuchi takes Suyuan and her two babies to the town of Kweilin for safety. Later, the Japanese attack Kweilin; so, Suyuan flees to Chungking where her husband is stationed. Tragedy strikes Suyuan twice. For the first time, she is forced to abandon her two babies because of exhaustion "in the hope that someone stronger than she will find them and care for them. In their clothes, she has concealed money and jewelry along with their names and the address of Suyuan's family home" (Huntley 51). Secondly, she learns that her husband is also killed in war. Then, she marries Canning Woo and has a daughter called Jing-mei in Chinese or (June in American) who was born in the USA. Formerly, Suyuan created the Joy Luck Club in Kweilin, China in the 1930s. Later, in San Francisco. America, in 1949, Suyuan with the other three women create the Joy Luck Club where they all live, have a feast, play Mahjong, share their oriental culture and tell stories as Suyuan later tells Jing-mei "each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only Joy. And that's how we

came to call our little parties Joy Luck" (JLC 25). These words explain the meaning of the book's title (The Joy Luck Club).

Suyuan points out that there are different reasons for establishing the Joy Luck Club. She founded it in China because of the horror of war, and in America because the immigrant women do not speak English well so they feel similarly helpless. Suyuan senses that the women of these families also had "unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldn't begin to express in their fragile English" (JLC 20). From Suyuan's perspective, the Joy Luck Club has served a similar purpose in both China and America that is to create a sense of belonging and happiness. In addition, in America, it will bring a sense of continuity between the old and new culture of the club members, and will help them preserve their identity in this new culture. Therefore, the Club is a symbol of hope and a means of asserting identity amidst change. It is obvious that Suyuan's main target is to promote the Chinese culture wherever she is. She is fiercely proud of her Chinese heritage, and struggles to make Jing-mei appreciate it.

The occurrence of role confusion is most prominent in Jing-mei, who is of American-Chinese parentage. Her mother, Suyuan, is a native Chinese who migrates to America whereas her father, Canning, is American. Her mixed heritage causes Jing-mei some woe as she is more inclined towards the American culture and is rather unappreciative of her Chinese roots. This is apparent in the "Joy Luck Club" chapter in three different situations. Firstly, when Jing-mei has been asked to replace her recently deceased mother in The Joy Luck Club, she feels insufficient "how can I be my mother at Joy Luck" (JLC 27). From Jing-mei's standpoint, the purpose of taking her mother's place is to keep a live a memory of her mother's past in her own present. Later, when Jing-mei takes her mother's place, she is not comfortable from the old aunties who are "dressed up in funny

Chinese dresses with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches of embroidered silk sewn over their breasts. These clothes were too fancy for real Chinese people, I thought, and too strange for American parties" (JLC 28). The strange clothes are a symbol of Jing-mei's being ashamed of the Chinese heritage.

Secondly, feeling out of place when she listens to the conversation among the aunties who "speak in their special language, half in broken English, half in their own Chinese dialect" (JLC 34). Jing-mei is frustrated and embarrassed greatly because of their inability to speak proper English. The last situation stems from Jing-mei who imagines the Joy Luck Club as "a shameful Chinese custom, like the secret gathering of the Ku Klux Klan or the tom-tom dances of TV Indians preparing for war"( JLC 28). As a consequence, the mothers desire to teach their daughters the philosophy of joy luck as a way of maintaining a linkage between two generations and two cultures. As Jing-mei notes the importance of the meaning of the "joy luck" on the part of the aunties at the end of the chapter entitled "the Joy Luck Club": "They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American- born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist" (JLC 41). According to their daughters, The Joy Luck Club signifies a meaning quite different from the original meaning that their mothers mean, They may have grown ignorant of the philosophy of joy luck without their mothers' influence during their childhood.

When she was young, Jing-mei Woo used' to see her mother as cruel and controlling as she mistakenly interprets her mother's love and guidance as a form of contemptuous interference. This is evidently reflected in "Two Kinds" chapter in which Jing-mei describes her childhood as "full of pain and resentment linked to having never become the prodigy that her mother desired her to be" (Ward, Mannheimer and Freidberg 42). Like the other mothers who want the best for their

daughters, Suyuan has high expectations for her daughter because she idealistically "believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America" (JLC 132). Compared to Lindo Jong, who is bragging about Waverly's prowess in chess, Suyuan wants to brag about Jing-mei's talent in order to find her daughter's hidden inner talents. As a result, she projects her desires on Jing-mei by making continuous efforts to mould her into a musical prodigy and to look and dance like Chinese Shirley Temple. When Jing-mei fails to achieve what her mother wants, Suyuan says "Not the best. Because you not trying" (JLC 136). To figure out the meaning of Suyuan's 'not trying,' Ward, Mannheimer and Freidberg who remark that "prodigy is really one's will, one's desire to succeed ... Jing-mei muses that perhaps she never gave herself a chance at the piano because she never devoted her will to trying" (44). This is what Suyaun intends; Jing-mei does not try hard enough. Thus, Jing-mci confesscs that she is not a genius just to spite her mother on many different occasions. Firstly, Suyuan's cruel treatment towards Jing-mei makes her more rebellious and more disobedient and this gets reflected when Jing- mei protests "why do not you like me the way I am? I am not a genius!" and Suyuan slaps her saying "who ask you be genius? Only ask you be your best. For your sake... So ungrateful" (JLC 136).

Secondly, the dispute between Suyuan and Jing-mei continues after seeing a nine-year-old Chinese girl playing the piano on the Ed Sullivan Show. Suyuan forces Jing-mei to take piano lessons through their neighbor, a retired piano teacher named Mr. Chong. She makes a great sacrifice on the hope of finding a better life for her daughter (Jing-mei). As payment, she does housecleaning for Mr. Chong in order to give Jing-mei free piano lessons. Initially, Jing-mei is reluctant to start piano lessons but after she discovers that he is deaf, "a fact which was generally unknown, she gladly continued her lessons, realizing that she could easily fool Mr.

Chong for he could not hear her. Jing-mei deliberately played, but Mr. Chong applauded and praised her playing instead of correcting her" (Guo 39).

Later, Jing-mei participates in a talent contest by Mr. Chong and her mother in which she plays "pleading child" from Schumann's scenes from childhood (JLC 138). Jing-mei is determined not to practice seriously in order to thwart her mother's aspiration. As expected. her performance at a recital proves how badly she is playing except for Mr. Chong who has clapped loudly. So. she felt the embarrassment she has caused to her family "1 felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly throughout the rest of the show" (JLC 140). In spite of Jing-mei's failure that disappointed her mother and left her wordless "a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything" (JLC 140), she never has to play again. After her failure on stage, Jing-mei believes that this would "put a stop to her foolish pride" (JLC 138). Like Waverly, Jing-mei has a big fight with Suyuan and this is due to her boasting of Jing-mei's talent to other mothers, especially Lindo Jong.

Furthermore, Jing-mei, who earlier resents her mother's determination from calling her a Chinese Shirley temple to forcing her to play the piano, now refuses not only to play anymore, but also decides not to listen to her mother "And then I decided. I didn't have to do what my mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before and look what happened" (JLC 141). Jing-mei has the impression that since she lives in America, not in China, she is free to choose what she wants to be. Thus, Jing-mei rejects the Chinese culture which is bound by strict traditions. She also believes that she is not Chinese at all and this annoys Suyuan greatly. The ensuing struggle between Suyuan and Jing- mei demonstrates how stubborn Jing-mei is, that is to say, her strong will not to bend to her mother's wish continues:

Jing-mei : I'll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!

Suyuan: only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter. (JLC 142)

Here, when Suyuan requests Jing-mei to be "obedient" which does not conform to the American culture, Jing-mei is filled with rage declaring that "then I wish I wasn't your daughter... then I wish I'd never been born!... I wish I were dead! Like them" (JLC 142). The pronoun "them" refers to her half-sisters whom her mother left in China, and Jing-mei does not know what has happened to them. This is a method of protecting herself because writing these words makes Jing-mei not only feel a sense of freedom, but also asserts her desire to hurt her mother as much as her mother hurts her As Loos points out, "the words were so shocking that her mother was left speechless and never made June take piano lessons again" (54). Consequently, the piano becomes a forbidden topic between Suyuan and Jing-mei.

A few years ago, when Suyuan gave Jing-mei the piano as a thirtieth birthday gift, Jing-mei regarded it as "a sign of forgiveness [on Suyuan's part]" (JLC 143). This gift is significant because it gives Jing-mei the opportunity to try playing the piano again, and it signifies the power of Suyuan's love for Jing-mei. After Suyuan's death, Jing-mei tries to play "Pleading Child" the same piece that she had played earlier so poorly at the recital when she was a child. Now she plays it easily and discovers that Schumann's music is composed of two parts "Pleading Child" and "Perfectly Contented". As she plays the two pieces together, she realizes for the first time that they are "two halves of the same song" (JLC 144), and she suddenly understands that mother and daughter need each other to make a whole piece like the complementary halves of the same song. Tan uses Schumann's

music as a metaphor "to highlight the relationship between mother and daughter. This relationship encompasses, like Schumann's music, two phases of the human experience. At times, these phases may appear to be contradictory, but. in fact, they are really two natural and complementary stages of life" (Shen 14). This perfectly is the case with Suyuan and Jing-mei. Initially, the struggle between Suyuan and Jing-mei is brought out at the beginning of the "Two Kinds" chapter. but at the end of this chapter, their relationships become better. Interestingly, Jing- imei begins to see her mother in a new light. She has developed from a "Pleading Child" to a "Perfectly Contented," although she is American, she is also Chinese. Therefore, she claims her Chinese heritage by obeying her mother who wants her to be successful in her life. As a consequence, Jing-mei articulates the fact that she loves belatedly the piano too much because it reminds her of her mother.

Telling Jing-mei about Suyuan's past brings a positive effect on Jing-mei character formation. This gets reflected in "A Pair of Tickets" chapter where Jing- mei and her father travel to China in order to fulfill Suyuan's dream. The trip is a pivotal turning point in Jing-mei's life. Earlier, Jing-mei remembers her clash with her mother when Suyuan used to tell Jing-mei stories about China and the war before, and Jing-mei says "I never thought my mother's Kweilin story was anything but a Chinese fairy-tale" (JLC 25). Later, after Suyuan's death, Jing-mei hears the same story from both her father and the Joy Luck Club women; at this moment, she realizes that this story is true. It is the Joy Luck Club aunties who asked Jing-mei to go to China to meet her half-sisters. Initially, Jing-mei is reluctant for she has nothing to tell her half-sisters about her mother's life which is incomprehensible. As Jing-mei responds "What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don't know anything" (JLC 40). When the mothers react with

disbelief "imagine, a daughter not knowing her own mother!"(JLC 40), it comes as a revelation to Jing-mei that the aunties are afraid:

In me, they see their own daughters. just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English...they see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. (JLC 40-41)

Seeing their own daughters represented in Jing-mei, the mothers' worry owes to their understanding that their relationship with their daughters are the same; that is to say they lack knowledge of their mother's lives. As a result, the mothers are filled with dismay that their stories will be disregarded after their deaths. Eventually, it is the Joy Luck aunties who carry on the quest and track down the lost babies in Shanghai.

By learning her mother's tragic story, Jing-mei becomes better equipped to restore her relationship with her mother. During this trip, her father explains the meaning of both her name and her mother's name. Concerning her name, "Jing" means "pure essence", "mei" means "younger sister". Suyuan's name means "long -cherished wish". Now, Jing-mei comes to understand her mother's wish is to be "the younger sister who was supposed to be the essence of the others" as her full name means. What Tan here means by 'others' is Jing-mei's other two sisters. After learning the connotation of these names, she feels sorrowful "I feed myself with the old grief, wondering how disappointed my mother must have been" (JLC 281).

Now, with a new consciousness, Jing-mei begins to see her mother in a new light. That is to say that Jing-mei finds her Chinese identity and renewed sense of her dead mother through two situations, one is physical and the second is emotional. Tan can explain the emotional situation when Jing-mei meets her Chinese half-sisters:

And then I see her. Her short hair. Her small body and now I see her again, two of her waving... As soon as I get beyond the gate, we run toward each other, all three of us embracing all hesitations and expectations forgotten.

"Mama, Mama," we all murmur, as if she is among us... I look at their face again and I see no trace of my mother in them. Yet they still look familiar. And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family: It is in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go.

(JLC 287-88)

The physical situation is demonstrated when Jing-mei has just taken a Polaroid photo of her and her sisters which resemble Suyuan as Jing-mei recognizes "Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes. her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish" (JLC 288). The meaning of Suyuan's name is achieved through Jing-mei's reunion with her family.

Further, when Jing-mei arrives in China, she feels that she is "becoming Chinese" (JLC 267). Earlier, she remembers her full rejection of anything Chinese. This is related to the personality development theory which suggests that teenagers behave in a way that is characterized as totalism. This means that there is "a setting of absolute boundaries in one's values, beliefs and interpersonal relationships" (qtd in Ryckman 186). During her adolescence, Jing-mei believes that anything American is better. Jing-mei's. cynical remark concerning anything Chinese is

evident in "A Pair of Tickets" chapter. When Suyuan tells Jing-mei "(Chinese] is in your blood," Jing-mei seems to be more upset to have heard these words from her mother. Consequently, this makes Jing-mei imagine instantly that her mother has transformed her into:

[A] warewolf, a mutant tag of DNA suddenly triggered, replicating itself insidiously into a syndrome, a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors, all those things my mother did to embarrass me-haggling with store owners. pecking her mouth with a toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes. (JLC 267)

Jing-mei views both her mother and the Chinese things that her mother does as ugly and backward. It is clear that Jing-mei believes that Chinese values are of a lower standard compared to American values.

Tan uses symbols merely to indicate how daughters' deep attachment to their mothers is, and also to disclose the Chinese culture that is passed from mothers to daughters. This gets reflected in the "Best Quality" chapter in which Jing-mei explains to the reader why Suyuan does give her the jade pendant and the underlying connotation. For Jing-mei, the Chinese New Year is an unhappy occasion. To celebrate the Chinese New Year, Suyuan has invited eight people to join her family for crab dinner. Suyuan's family includes Canning, Jing-mei and herself. The eight people are Lindo, Tin Jong, Vincent, Lisa; Vincent's girlfriend, Waverly, Rich, Shoshana, and Mr.Chong. So, the attendants become eleven. While Suyuan has accompanied Jing-mei to the market to buy crabs, Suyuan has carefully selected the feistiest crabs explaining to Jing-mei that they are of best quality.

When she poked to find the liveliest crabs, she found one losing a limb. She refused to take it for "a missing leg is a bad sign on Chinese New Year" (JLC 200). After a long discussion, the fishmonger gives Suyuan the mutilated crab for free. Suyuan has not counted Shoshana, so she has bought only ten crabs. When she sees the extra person, she decides to cook the eleventh crab.

During dinner, Waverly and Jing-mei begin to dispute about business agreement. Waverly criticizes Jing-mei's hairdresser, calling him gay and warning he probably has AIDS. Jing-mei retaliates Waverly mentioning that her work or firm has not paid her for a freelance advertising sales pitch she has done for them. Waverly retorts that her quality of work is unacceptable. Knowing that Jing-mei has been humiliated intensely by Waverly. Suyuan gives Jing-mei the jade pendant and tells her that it represents the importance of life. Jing-mei thinks that her mother's present is to comfort her partly, but Suyuan asserts that this is not the reason.

At this moment, Suyuan begins to recognize the fundamental differences between Jing-mei's and Waverly's personalities and motivations. These differences are demonstrated clearly when Waverly and everyone on the table have picked the best crabs, except Suyuan and Jing-mei. On the contrary, Jing-mei has picked the bad crab in order to give her mother a better one as Suyuan expects "only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everybody else wants best quality. You thinking different" (JLC 208). Suyuan sees this virtue as a kind of generosity and selflessness. Therefore, Suyuan gives her the necklace, which is of the best quality, and makes Jing-mei recognize her own worth. Suyuan is proud of Jing-mei because she has inherited the same traits of modesty and selflessness from her, like the pendant. As a result, Suyuan does not value Waverly and makes a metaphorical connection between Waverly and the crab "She is like

this crab... always walking sideways, moving crooked" (JLC 208). Suyuan advises Jing-mei not to listen to Waverly and to move in a different direction "You can move your legs go the other way" (JLC 208). That is to say that Suyuan wants Jing-mei to think for herself and value herself.

According to Tan, the pendant has different interpretations in the novel. As Jing-mei observes that at first she does not like wearing the pendant because it signifies the cultural differences between Suyuan and Jing-mei "To me, the whole effect looked wrong: too large, too green, too garishly ornate" (JLC 197). She remarks that the other Chinese people who are wearing similar pendants do know the meaning "it's as though we were all sworn to the same secret covenant, s0 secret we don't even know what we beiong to" (JLC 198). Then, she wonders if the pendant has a specific meaning and thus asks whether the aunties or the Chinese friends can read the pendant. She acknowledges that if they interpret its meaning, it will be different from what her mother intends. Only after Suyuan's death, Jing-mei has come to realize its meaning "I wore this on my skin, so when you put it on your skin, then you know my meaning. This is your life's importance" (JLC 208). Here, Suyuan believes that the pendant will not only transfer the Chinese culture but also the love from mother to daughter. Finally, the jade pendant is a symbol of the importance of passing down the Chinese culture from Suyuan to Jing-mei.

Besides, Tan uses food to represent the loving bond between mother and daughter. This is evident when Waverly criticizes Jing-mei's writing style, and Suyuan responds with a subtle insult "June not sophisticate like you. Must be born this way." From Suyuan's remark, Jing-mei feels humiliated and betrayed, but the following lines prove the contrary as she realizes "I could hear my mother eating an orange slice. She was the only person I knew who crunched oranges, making it

sound as if she were eating crisp apples instead. The sound of it was worse than gnashing teeth" (JLC 206). Gnashing her teeth signifies Suyuan's anger as Hsiao puts it and continues saying: "She has no choice but to transform her anger into crunching" (209-10).

Tan uses the mah jong game to depict numerous and diverse ideas. Crucial to analyzing theme and structure of the novel, is to define briefly what the mah jong game is and how Tan uses it successfully as both simile and symbolic devices. Mah jong is a popular Chinese game which involves four players just as the novel involves four mothers. It is Ronald Emerick who gives the reader an overview about the structure of the mah jong game "A complete game of mah jong requires at least sixteen hands: four rounds, each consisting of four hands and each hand representing one of the four players- or one of the four winds" (55). It is obvious that the novel is structured somewhat like the mah jong game. It is divided into four sections, each section consisting of four parts and each part representing one of the four mothers or one of the four daughters (Emerick 55).

The structure of the novel reflects the generational gap between mothers and daughters as Walter Shear points out "Tan organizes her material in terms of a generational contrast by segregating stories of mothers and their daughters" (17). In the first and the last sections, the four mothers tell about their lives in pre-1949 China, except for Suyuan who has died and her stories are narrated by Jing-mei. The second and the third sections include the four daughters who tell their stories of growing up in America and their marriage problems. In the first chapter, "the Joy Luck Club," Suyuan explains to Jing-mei the difference between the Jewish version of mah jong and the Chinese mah jong "Jewish mah jong, they watch only for their own tile, play only with their eyes... Chinese mah jong, you must play using your head, very tricky" (JLC 33). The difference lies in the fact that the

Chinese game is characterized by strategy. Thus, Tan makes a comparison between the four players and the four daughters that is demonstrated by Emerick "the four daughters, like four players in a mah jong game, must learn to combine strategy and luck if they hope to succeed in the game of life. Specifically, they must learn the joy luck philosophy of the four experienced mah jong players of the novel, their mothers" (60-61). The importance of the game itself, on the part of the mothers, is to teach their daughters how to succeed in their lives by adopting a strategy just as each player must devise it for winning. The main target of the game is similar to the main target of the four mothers who want their daughters to be successful in their lives. Moreover, the mothers want their daughters to see the world through their Chinese eyes. To conclude, the mah jong game "symbolizes a link between mothers and daughters, a cultural bridge between the past and the present, a tradition that can be transferred from one generation to the next" (Emerick 60).

The four mothers occupy a specific position, Suyuan is in the East, An-mei represents the South, Lindo occupies the West, and Ying-ying sits in the North. As Anthony Christie reflects, "The four sides of the mah jong table symbolize the four points of the compass and four seasons" (46-47). The East represents spring, the South represents summer; the West represents autumn; and the North represents winter. Jing-mei sits in her mother's place on the east side "where things begin... the direction from which the sun rises, where the wind comes from" (JLC 33). Tan uses the East to symbolize China in which the four mothers have lived, and also to represent Jing-mei. It is appropriate for Jing-mei to sit on the east side since the novel ends with her momentous trip to China. Accepting her mother's role in the mah jong game indicates that it is a first step toward understanding her mother at

the end of the novel and also makes a connection between her mother's generation and her own.

Popo, An-mei's mother and An-mei Hsu

An-mei's mother is the main object in An-mei's life because she is the only parent present. The story of An-mei Hsu revolves around the lives of four women which includes the grandmother (Popo), An-mei's mother (unnamed), the daughter (An-mei), and the granddaughter (Rose Hsu Jordan). Although An-mei has a mother; it is Popo (her grandmother) who raises her according to the traditional Chinese way as An-mei confesses later "I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness" (JLC 215). It is important to relate An-mei's childhood from 1923 in Ningbo, China in order to comprehend fully the drastic relationship between mother and daughter, especially between Popo and An-mei's mother, and how this affects An- mei's character development.

An-mei's mother depicts Popo (her mother) as abusive and domineering as she wants to immerse An-mei's mother in her world of misery. Popo rejects An-mei's mother's remarriage. This is due to the strict Chinese rules concerning remarriage which governed their relationship. According to David K. Jordan, "the ethnographic literature suggests that throughout the Chinese population, remarriage of a widow [was]... considered a most dishonorable thing" (156). This means that a mother who dishonors the family by becoming a concubine, is referred to as a ghost or a forbidden topic. This is what happens to An-mei's mother. Like Lindo's mother-in-law, Huang Taitai, Popo is the advocate of the traditional Chinese values. Thus, she has the power to expel An-mei's mother from the house. As a result, An-mei's mother has been thrown out of the family. This gets reflected

when An-mei was four years old. After the death of An-mei's father, An-mei and her brother are living at their uncle's house with their maternal grandmother.

The relationship between Popo (the grandmother) and An-mei (the granddaughter) can only be described as loving but cruel and harsh. Popo loves An-mei and tries to teach her the traditional Chinese way of upbringing of how girls have "to be silent and listen to [their] elders" (JLC 217). Therefore, she unintentionally tells An-mei frightening stories about disobedient girls and what happens to them; for instance, "when you lose your face... it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it" (JLC 44). Here, this story, which An-mei does not understand, refers to her own mother. Popo also tells An-mei that her mother is a ghost. The ghost does not mean that her mother is literally dead, but "In those days, a ghost was anything we were forbidden to talk about" (JLC 42). An-mei is forbidden to see her mother and speak her name for reasons which are kept from An-mei for years. As Popo warns her "Never say her name... To say her name is to spit on your father's grave" (JLC 43). Popo wants to erase An-mei's mother forever from An-mei's memory. Popo breaks all ties between An-mei and her mother, and forces An-mei to live with her. Feeling intensely the agony of being abandoned by her mother, An-mei suffers greatly because of this.

For An-mei, she is hungry for the attentions of her mother "I watched my mother, seeing her for the first time" (JLC 45). She is frustrated that her mother is an outcast in the uncle's family. After her mother's remarriage, An-mei is sent to her grandmother's home after the death of her father. This happens in accordance with what Julia Kristeva observes in Traditional China "a woman submitted throughout her life to a whole series of authorities: her own mother and father, her husband's mother and father, her husband, and, finally, her son" (71). So, An-mei

is dissatisfied with her own life because she is in the care of her grandmother who brings her up in a traditional Chinese way "I could only watch and listen.. I could not cry if I was disappointed. I had to be silent and listen to my elders" (JLC 217). This means that girls should be self-effacing and silent.

Food plays a pivotal role in the portrayal of hardships which have a harmful effect on daughters' personality on the part of their mothers. The outstanding example is the thrilling story of An-mei in childhood. Like Waverly, "For An-mei Hsu, food is a reminder of pain that she associates with her grandmother whom she called Popo" (Huntley 59). When An-mei's mother, after becoming a number three concubine to a rich man called Wu Tsing, argues with her family to take An-mei with her, a pot of boiling soup spills over and scalds An-mei's neck which leaves a scar "in [her] skin's memory" (JLC 46). The soup symbolizes the wrath of the family members; she says "It was as though everyone's anger were pouring all over me" (JLC 46). The soup is a symbol of punishment for both An-mei's mother and An-mei. The reason behind An-mei's mother's and her family's argument is due to the limits set for the widows in the traditional Chinese society which An- mei's mother has transgressed, so she has been punished. An-mei herself is also punished for her trial to go with her mother; therefore, An-mei's mother's family deem her behavior as disobedient and deserves punishment or contempt. After this incident, An-mei realizes that the scar that she carries is not only physical but also emotional. In other words, it is the scar that finally connects An-mei with her mother.

An-mei identifies greatly with her mother, despite sharing a difficult relationship. An-mei and her mother have been kept apart for years, until Popo has fallen ill, and An-mei's mother returns home to nurse her mother back. She does the most obedient thing for her sick mother by cutting her own flesh from her arm

in order to add to a traditional Chinese soup in the hope that it will alleviate Popo's pain. According to ancient tradition, such a sacrifice might cure a dying family member, but her attempt fails and Popo dies. Consequently, for An-mei, the scar that her mother carries is an act of deep love and reverence to her mnother (Popo). This sacrifice is not only a symbol that clearly indicates how deep An-mei's mother's attachment is to her mother (Popo), but it is also a symbol of the loving bond between An-mei and her mother. As Ward. Mannheimer and Freidberg point out: "An-mei, too, carries a scar that represents her tie to her mother. These bodily wounds function as symbols for An-mei of a daughter's corporeal bond to her mother, as reminders that one's mother is in one's bones" (34).

An-mei's mother teaches An-mei to see the world through her eyes. She teaches her two distinct lessons. These lessons, from the mother's angle, are beneficial and valuable because of their profound influences on An-mei's character development. The first lesson, which she tries to impart to An-mei, is to swallow her tears through the parable of the turtle. The parable, narrated by An-mei's mother, is demonstrated in the chapter entitled "Magpies." After the death of Popo, An-mei is crying because her mother prepared herself to return to Tientsin and leave her. Seeing An-mei's teardrops, she tells her that one day when she was just a child about An-mei's age, she sat crying by the pond where the turtle lives. According to the parable, the turtle consumes her tears, and therefore knows her misery "the turtle said, I have eaten your tears, and this is why I know your misery. But I must warn you. If you cry, your life will always be sad" (JLC 217). Later, there are seven eggs that pour out of his beak, and come from the tears that he has swallowed. From these eggs emerge magpies, birds of joy. which fly away laughing. Finally, the morale of this story is explained by the turtle "Now you see...why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They

feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears" (JLC 217). The significance of the story of the turtle, on the part of An-mei's mother, is to pay An-mei's heed to the turtle's warning, just as her own mother (Popo) has taught her before. She teaches An-mei how to assert herself instead of crying because when crying, others often feed off your weakness rather than feeling sorry for you. This is exactly what An-mei does later. An-mei's mother uses her talent in choosing the turtle's story particularly in order to teach An-mei how to hide her sorrow, and to aspire for joy and happiness. This has a huge influence on An-mei's character development during childhood.

Tan uses the symbol of the turtle to indicate the life miseries of both An-mei and her mother, and how they overcome these obstacles. According to the Chinese culture, the turtle here is a symbol of endurance, wisdom, reason and tenacity. For An-mei, for instance, she stands up against the patriarch's forbiddance. When An- mei's uncle forbids her to go with her mother, she challenges his angry exhortation and decides to leave that house. Consequently, her uncle finally lets her go, but he considers her "finished" (JLC 219). This means that just like her mother who has been disowned by the family, An-mei too has been thrown out of the family.

The second lesson, which she tries to teach An-mei, is to see beyond appearances by crushing a pearl from the second wife's necklace. More significantly, for An-mei's mother, this lesson has a profound influence on An- mei's character development as it also teaches her to be on guard against deceit. In "Magpies" chapter, the story of crushing the false pearls is narrated by An-mei's mother. An-mei's mother and An-mei travel to Tientsin in which they live in the household of a businessman Wu Tsing, in spite of the curses of her family. There, she lives as a third concubine or Fourth Wife, with him and his other wives. As a result of being a lowly fourth wife, she has not only to suffer ill-treatment from

both the man and his other wives, especially the Second Wife, she also does not even have a name, and consequently she has no identity. When she gave birth to a son after three years of marriage, the Second Wife claims the boy as her own. The Second Wife deliberately pretends to show her affection in front of An-mei's mother. Also, she gives An-mei a pearl necklace to win her affection, and An-mei says "I was overjoyed that Second Wife had shown me this special favor" (JLC 231). But An-mei's mother warns her not to be manipulated by the Second Wife "She is trying to trick you, so you will do anything for her" (JLC 231). Later, An- mei's mother crushes one of the pearls beneath her feet in order to counter Second Wife's trickery, proving to An-mei that it was made of glass.

Yan Chang, the servant of An-mei's mother, tells An-mei the story of her mother's painful past. Although it is Yan Chang's choice of revealing her mother's story, this has an efficacious influence on An-mei's life. At first, An-mei learns more and more about the wives and their various and domineering powers. Yan Chang explains to An-mei that Wu Tsing's First Wife, a plain and honest woman, who "has the most power by virtue of her power, but her spirit was broken" (Rozakis 32) because the children she bore had physical deformities or large birthmarks. The first child was born with one leg shorter than the other, and the second has a large birthmark over half her face "this one with two perfect legs, but -alas! – with a brown tea stain splashed over half her face" (JLC 232). So, the First Wife spends her time going to Buddhist temples hoping to seek cures for children." Yet, she has no children, but she has her own home, and Wu Tsing "increased the allowance she needed to manage her own household" (JLC 233).

An-mei also learns the story behind Second Wife. She is a famous singer whom Wu Tsing married for "the prestige of owning what so many other men wanted" (JLC 234). Using her wits, she manages to control Wu Tsing's money.

Knowing his fear of ghosts, she feigns suicide by eating "raw opium, enough to make her sick" (ILC 234-35) in order to get an increase in her allowance. She continues this plot until she gets everything she wants, "But one thing she could not have: children" (JLC 235). Therefore, she has found a woman to become Wu Tsing's Third Wife. Later, when the Third Wife bears only three daughters, she arranges for An-mei's mother to become Fourth Wife by tricking her into marriage with Wu Tsing. This happened when An-mei and Yan Chang were visiting a Buddhist pagoda to worship. The pagoda was on a lake, and on the way back, they share a boat with Wu Tsing and Second Wife. It is the Second Wife who invites An-mei's mother for dinner and to play Mahjong. Then, she invites her to stay for the night and they sleep on the same bed. As planned, the "Second Wife got up in the middle of the night and left the dark room, and Wu Tsing took her place" (JLC 236). He raped An-mei's mother, but the Second Wife complains that An-mei's mother has seduced her husband. An-mei's mother is forced to become the Fourth Wife of a rich man in order to save her reputation. As a result, she asks the businessman to allow her and her daughter to live in a different house. He first approves, but then reneges on his promise under pressure from his Second Wife, who is afraid that the businessman will favour An-mei's mother, who is younger and more beautiful than her.

An-mei's mother, hoping to remedy her situation, commits suicide in order to grant An-mei a respected rank in Wu Tsing's household. She has planned her suicide cunningly so she dies three days before a lunar new year. According to the Chinese tradition, one's ghost returns on the third day after death, except An-mei's mother's case, her ghost cause evil misfortune on the first day of new year: "on the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In [An-mei's mother's] case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year" (JLC 240). An-

mei's mother has chosen the lunar New Year specifically because of its magnificent importance for Chinese people. As Yan Guo remarks "the lunar New Year is the most important of all the universal festivals. On the first day of New Year, family members gather together, eating good food and speaking sweet words. It is supposed to be a peaceful and happy day for everybody" (36). If An- mei's mother's ghost comes back to haunt the businessman's family on the first day of New Year, it will mean that the ghost will cause mischief for the whole year. "Wu Tsing fearful of [her] vengeful spirit... promised her visiting ghost that he would raise Syaudi and [An-mei] as his honored children. He promised to revere her as if she had been First Wife, his only wife" (JLC 240).

Before her mother dies, An-mei begins to comprehend her mother's purpose when "she whisper[s] to me that she would rather kill her own weak spirit so she could give me a stronger one" (JLC 240). What does Tan mean by her weak spirit? Her weak spirit refers to her suicide that is a consequence of her earlier shame. Her mother's suicide is the turning point which gives An-mei the invisible power of revenge. Thus, An-mei begins to shout and to rise up and fight back against the businessman and his Second Wife "And on that day, I showed Second Wife the fake pearl necklace she had given me and crushed it under my foot... And on that day, I learned to shout" (JLC 240).

Later on, An-mei immigrates to the USA and has a new identity. She marries George Hsu, "a pharmacist's assistant who had once been a doctor in China" (JLC 121). Then, she moves to San Francisco where she shares a work with Lindo Jong in a fortune cookie factory. She and her husband have four sons (Matthew, Mark, Luke and Bing), and three daughters (Rose, Janice and Ruth).

An-mei Hsu Jordan and Rose Hsu Jordan

An-mei is Rose's object as they share a strong yet tragic relationship. A tragedy strikes her when her son Bing drowns at the Devil's Slide. An-mei loses her faith in God after this incident. An-mei, who adopts the Baptist faith and carries a small Bible to the church, has stopped attending the church as Snodgrass adds "To restore balance to the family, she uses the bible as a wedge to stabilize a wobbly table, a gesture of disrespect toward the god who failed her" (73). This tragic event has a profound effect on the relationship between An-mei and Rose. An-mei's relationship with Rose is characterized by distance and lack of communication. Rose admits that she has been an obedient child then becomes a submissive adult "I used to believe everything my mother said, even when I didn't know what she meant... More than thirty years later, my mother was still trying to make me listen" (JLC 185). An-mei has always tried to impose her will on Rose during childhood and adulthood, and this has a negative influence on Rose's character development. As a child, she is often frightened by her mother's stories of ghosts and Old Mr Chou, the man who "according to [her] mother was the guardian of a door that opened into dreams" (JLC 186). She remembers dreaming about being in Mr. Chou's garden, where he chased her through the garden, then shouted warnings about listening to her mother "see what happens when you don't listen to your mother" (JLC 186). An-mei hopes to teach Rose that if she listens to her, she will later know what she knew.

Rose views her mother as cruel and domineering as she thinks that she is deliberately going against her pursuit of happiness. When she receives a marriage proposal from Ted, both An-mei and Mrs. Jordan (Ted's mother) object to their budding relationship due to their different cultures. Initially, An-mei does not approve Ted because "He is American... A waigoren" (JLC 117). The response of

Rose that "I'm American too" (JLC 117) bothers An-mei greatly for she is a typical Chinese American woman who thinks that the two very different heritages (Chinese and American) should not blend. Rose, like the other daughters in the novel, has tried to avoid her Chinese mother and everything Chinese. So, she starts dating a Caucasian man even though her mother insists on marrying a Chinese- American. What attracts Rose towards Ted is his complete difference from Chinese men "his brashness: the assuredness in which he asked for things and expected to get them; his opinionated manner; his angular face and lanky body; the thickness of his arms; the fact that his parents immigrated from Tarrytown, New York, not Tientsin, China" (JLC 117).

It is highly significant to show how the clash of cultures affects not only the relationship between mother and daughter, but also between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law such as Mrs. Jordan and Rose. Mrs. Jordan. Rose's mother-in-law in future, explains a number of reasons why Ted cannot marry Rose. She states that she does not only consider Rose to be American, but she also mistakenly assumes she is Vietnamese. Hurt and infuriated by Mrs. Jordan who shows her own prejudice against her and other minorities, Rose says in a soft voice: "Mrs. Jordan, I am not Vietnamese,... even though I was on the verge of shouting" (JLC 118). Ironically, Mrs. Jordan confesses to Rose that she is not against minorities; in fact she "personally knew many fine people who were Oriental, Spanish, and even black" (JLC 118). However, she also suggests that Ted will go to medical school to become a doctor. Then, he associates with people from a privileged background in the future, and continues alluding to unpopular Vietnam War (JLC 118). Mrs. Jordan's apparent hatred to Orientals causes a terrifying shock to Rose who concludes that all Orientals are depicted as the enemy by the white Americans.

Rose, who is in her thirties, works as a production assistant for graphic artists, and is married to Ted against the will of both families. As a result, Ted and Rose do not only clung to each other, but Rose also admits that her relationship with Ted falls into an unfortunate pattern: "I was victim to his hero" (JLC 118). That is to say, Rose imagines Ted as the hero who always saves her. and makes all the decisions for her, and she is the victim who follows him without question, and is in need of protection:

Over the years, Ted decided where we went on vacation. He decided what new' furniture we should buy. He decided we should wait until we moved into a better neighborhood before having children. We used to discuss some of these matters, but we both knew the question would boil down to my saying, "Ted, you decide." After a while there were no more discussions. Ted simply decided. And I never thought of objecting. (JLC 119)

Ironically, despite the fact of being raised in an American way, Rose, just like Lena St. Clair, behaves willingly like a traditional Chinese woman when she chooses to play a pattern of inaction in her marriage.

Later, things change after Ted has made a serious mistake with a patient and his own self-confidence withers. Then, he pushes Rose to make some decisions, but he wearies of her spineless nature and indecisiveness. It is important to note that the reason behind Rose's inability to make decisions is the death of her little brother Bing. This tragic event had a profound effect on Rose's life during adulthood. One day, the whole family takes a brief vacation on a beach, and Rose has been given the responsibility of looking after her younger brothers, especially Bing because he is the youngest one: "Take care of them,[said mother]...why did / have to care for them? And she gave me the same answer: "Yiding." I must... How else could I

learn responsibility? How else could I appreciate what my parents had done for me?" (JI.C 123). Rose sometimes thinks that she is responsible for Bing's death, because he slipt on a reef, then fell into the ocean, and finally drowned while Rose was inattentive. The guilt of causing Bing's death makes Rose indecisive and vulnerable. Consequently, "she frees herself from adult responsibilities by letting others make decisions for her" (Snodgrass 87).

Eventually, Ted makes his final decision, that is, to divorce her and then drifts into an affair. Rose does not know what to do and their relationship becomes strained. She collapses mentally; so, she consults a psychiatrist for help but her mother thinks this psychiatrist is foolish. The divorce is a turning point that elaborates the loving bond between An-mei and Rose. Rose dreads confessing to her mother that her marriage is falling apart. For An-mei, marriage bonds are sacred and should not be broken easily. This means that An-mei does not want Rose to give up on her marriage and she must try harder to preserve it "This cannot be... Then you must save it" (JLC 116).

An-mei teaches Rose to see the world through her eyes. Like An-mei's mother, she wants to pass on Rose a significant lesson-that is to have faith in herself and to stand up for herself because this gives her a strong identity. An-mei observes the opposite in the chapter entitled "Magpies":

Even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way"(JLC 215).

The explanation of this passage implies that even though mothers and daughters are raised in totally different cultures, they share the same similarities. More clearly, Rose does integrate parts of her mother's behavior into her own character. For example, she, just like her mother, sacrifices her own desires in order to make her husband happy. Furthermore, it is tragic that woman's fate in America seems so similar to that in China. Yan Guo points out that An-mei is having more knowledge about women's inferior status than Rose:

If her mother is consciously aware of women's inferior status in China, Rose is unconsciously falls into the trap of the double patriarchy in America... At this stage Rose's mother sees more clearly than Rose her daughter's subservience to her Caucasian husband even if she does not articulate the idea. (37-38)

Telling Rose about An-mei's past in China is absolutely necessary in developing Rose's character. She tells her how she faced the problem of finding her own voice, and how she learned to shout at those who try to silence her. An-mei does not only help Rose to make a choice for herself as she simply asks her "Why do you not speak up for yourself" (JLC 193). Like Ying-ying, An-mei predicts the collapse of Rose's marriage. It is An- mei's perception that enables her to confront Ted who is cheating on her "Why does he send you a check?.. He is doing monkey business with someone else?.. Back home, I thought about what she said. And it was true" (JLC 188). Rose scoffs at her mother's intuition, but later she realizes that her mother is right when she guessed that Ted wants to remarry. When Ted wants to buy Rose out of the house with a cheque, An-mei is upset from her inability to speak up "I am not telling you to save your marriage... I only say you should speak up" (JLC 193). Thus, she endeavors to instill an understanding of her Chinese

heritage, and at the same time she raises her in an American way as Gloria Shen explains:

The Chinese way consists of not expressing one's desires, not speaking up, and not making choices. The American way consists of exercising choices and speaking up for oneself. An-mei Hsu raised Rose in the American way. She hoped that this would allow her daughter to lead a better life than the one she had in China. (9)

An-mei's awareness that not all Chinese ways are right helps Rose confront Ted. Finally, she has acted on her mother's advice to speak up for herself. For the first time in her life, she stands up for what she wants. She bravely refuses to sign the divorce papers so she has the right to stay in the house. By learning about her mother's past, Rose becomes better equipped to fight Ted back. Now, she comes to understand the significance of finding her own voice again because she is filled with wood "You can't just pull me out of your life and throw me away... the power of my words was that strong" (JLC 196).

Tan uses metaphors to show how mothers participate actively in the identity formation of the daughters. The metaphor of wood that An-mei uses in describing Rose's personality is mentioned apparently in "Without Wood" chapter. "A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak" (JLC 191). In this quotation, An-mei compares Rose to a young tree saying if she listens to other people, she will bend and will be destroyed like a tree with little wood. Saying the opposite is An-mei's admonition to Rose that she must listen to her mother if she wants to grow strong and straight. In other words, An-mei tries to tell her that

"happiness requires strength, like a tree with enough wood to survive strong winds" (Mussarie 71). Faced with a difficult divorce in which Ted tries to take everything from her. Rose "had been talking to too many people, my friends, everybody it seems, except Ted" (JLC 188). An-mei chides Rose for telling not only her friends such as Waverly and Lena, but also a psychiatrist a different story. Each of whom offers a different response. According to An-mei's diagnosis, Rose is not having enough wood in her personality "My mother once told me why I was so confused all the time. She said I was without wood. Born without wood... she knew this, because once she had almost become this way" (JLC 191). Rose's bending to other's ideas annoys An-mei greatly as she does not want Rose to be similar to her:

An-mei admits to having listened to too many people when she was young. She almost succumbed to her family's urging's to forget her mother, and later she was nearly seduced by the pearl necklace offered to her by her mother's rival. Experience has shown An-mei that people try to influence others for selfish reasons. (Hamilton 133).

Rose blames An-mei who provides this advice too late "by the time she told me this, it was too late. 1 had already begun to bend" (JLC 191).Rose says that she has already begun school and has begun to bow not only under the influence of her teachers and peers but also under the influence of the American culture. The problem, as Rose defines it, is that "It was only later that I discovered there was a serious flaw with the American version. There were too many choices, so it was easy to get confused and pick the wrong thing. That's how 1 felt about my situation with Ted "(JLC 191). Rose realizes that not all the American ways are right. Consequently, she is influenced by An-mei's Chinese notions that she decides to listen to her mother who embraces the Chinese heritage and begins to feel closer to her.

In Rose's case, she is hungry because she sees her mother's love and guidance as a form of meddling. An-mei does not understand why Rose goes to see a psychiatrist rather than talk to her own mother "Why can you talk about this with a psyche-atric and not with mother?.. [She pleads to her daughter by saying] A mother is best. A mother knows what is inside you... a psyche-atrics will only make you hulihudu, make you see heimongmong" (JLC 188). Obviously, An-mei does not approve of Rose's seeing a psychiatrist because of her traditional Chinese heritage. Contrary to her mother, Rose who embraces the American ways, prefers seeing a psychiatrist, compared to the Chinese. Stephen Souris explains why the Americans prefer seeing a psychiatrist rather than the Chinese people: "From the American perspective it is normal and stylish for Rose to see a psychiatrist; from the Chinese perspective, seeing a psychiatrist is incomprehensible- indeed, An-mei might even regard it as bringing shame upon the family" (70). Firstly, Rose is frustrated from not only An-mei's inability to articulate the word psychiatrist which she refers to it as psyche-atrics, but also from her bad opinion about a psychiatrist.

Secondly, Rose gets frustrated from the difficulty of translating An-mei's Chinese expressions such as hulihudu and heimonmong. Although Rose masters the English language, she admits that the translation of these words does not have the same meaning "These were words I had never thought about in English terms. I suppose the closest in meaning would be "confused" and "dark fog." But really the words mean much more than that. Maybe they can't be easily translated because they refer to a sensation that only Chinese people have" (JLC 188). An-mei does her utmost to become closer to Rose but she fails on account of the language gap. Rose is not contended with her life because "[her] mother uses Chinese expressions not only to preserve her right to speak Chinese, but also to suggest to her daughter that her Chinese way of thinking is better than that of Rose's American

psychiatrist" (Yan Guo 38). Thus, Rose approves an American life which is not bound by superstitions or strict traditions.

Lindo Jong and her mother

Lindo and her mother share a strong yet tragic relationship. Her mother is Lindo's object as she is very much involved in her upbringing, and personality formation. Lindo Jong's story starts with her memory of a childhood in Taiyuan. It reflects Lindo's disconnection from her family. At age two, Lindo is engaged to Tyan-yu Huang, a one-year-old boy, by an arrangement of the village matchmaker at sixteen. Lindo is greatly identified with her mother and becomes attached to her. When her mother agrees on the arranged marriage, Lindo is not angry, but decides to sacrifice her life in order to fulfill her parents' promise. By doing so, her mother truly believes that she is doing the best for Lindo because she is getting married to a wealthy family, and was also making Lindo look good and be accepted. Lindo realizes that her mother loves her "My mother did not treat me this way because she didn't love me" (JLC 51). Du Pree comments on this quotation saying "Although her mother's behavior gives Lindo a sense of rejection, she realizes that her mother acts out of self-preservation, because the mother / daughter connection will soon end" (29).

Since then, even though she lived with her own family for the next ten years, she was treated like a stranger "as if {she] belonged to someone else" (JLC 51). Her mother constantly refers to her as her future-in-law's daughter. This does not mean that she did not love Lindo, but she would treat her that way because "she wouldn't wish for something that was no longer hers" (JLC 51). Even though Lindo and her mother share the same culture, there is no communication between

them. This lack of communication is the result of the disastrous events that happened in China. As Wendy Ho points out:

The historical events and natural disasters in China also play a role in shaping the Joy Luck mothers. They and their mothers before them, in one way or another, experience a range of horrific wars and chaos, evacuations, deaths, economic turmoil, revolutionary changes, poverty, floods, and famines that seriously impinge on their personal relationships and communication (336).

When her family loses their home due to a massive flood, she is forced to work at her future husband's house in order to save her family from starvation. Lindo is frustrated that her mother is an outcast in the Huang family. She is angry because she feels that her mother immerses her in an environment full of despair. The loving bond between Lindo and her mother is the exact opposite bond between Lindo and her mother-in-law.

Once Lindo arrives, she learns that her place is not with the other children, but in the kitchen with the cooks and servants "I knew my standing" (JLC 55). In this household, Lindo is surprised from their treatment of her (and especially her mother-in-law) like a servant, not as she expects "I came to think of Huang Taitai [her mother-in-law] as my real mother, someone I wanted to please, [and] someone I should follow and obey without question" (JLC 56). She never disobeyed her mother-in-law or her future husband even though they both were vicious, and complained about everything she did. Lindo does this because she wants to be a good daughter-in-law and to keep the promise she made to her parents when she was younger.

The relationship between Lindo and mother-in-law can only be described as cruel and harsh. There is simply no love or affection between them. The strict rules (concerning marriage and its rituals) which governed China affect the relationship between Lindo and her mother-in-law. What binds them together is Huang Taitai's desire for a loyal. hardworking wife for her son. Huang Taitai is only pleased and happy when Lindo does the tedious tasks correctly, and is frustrated when Lindo does not become pregnant. To make Lindo fertile, Huang took away all Lindo's gold and "confined [her] to the bed so that her grandchildren seeds would not spill out so easily" (JLC 62), because in the Chinese culture, women's main goal in life is to give birth to children. Huang never loved Lindo, but instead saw her as a means to obtain what she wanted. From this horrible treatment, Lindo realized that she could not live the rest of her life with such mother-in-law.

Evidently. Lindo's story differs from An-mei's and Ying-ying's in one respect, but it resembles Suyuan's story. In a sense, as Suyuan creates her own happiness by establishing the Joy Luck Club, Lindo likewise has found her happiness in two things: the first is keeping her parents' promise, and the second is the understanding of the Chinese tradition which enabled her to assert her own identity. This is a second promise she has made to herself before the wedding as she explains "I would always remember my parents' wishes, but I would never forget myself" (JLC 58).

To clarify how Lindo uses her wits to convince the Huangs that it was their idea to get rid of her, she devises a plan by playing on Taitai's superstition and reverence for her ancestor for getting out of her arranged marriage without disgracing her family. Loos describes Lindo's personality as "shrewd and observant enough to manipulate her husband, his family, and the matchmaker, using their superstitious natures against them" (58). To make the Huang family

allow her a divorce, she managed to fake a prophetic nightmare on a propitious day on the Chinese calendar: "Lindo tells Huang Taitai of the three signs that the ancestors will send to show their disapproval. The first two signs, Lindo's loss of teeth and her husband's black mole, symbolize death. They are encountered by the third sign which signifies life the servant girl's pregnancy" (Wilson 68). Lindo tricks her mother-in-law saying that a servant girl is pregnant by Tyan-yu, and also claims that if Tyan-yu remains married to Lindo, he will die. This made her family-in-law believe that the marriage was unsuccessful. Lindo is divorced and the servant girl married Tyan-yu "the divorce gives Lindo a second chance at the same time that it feeds her illusion of autonomy and control" (Snodgrass 83). It is her mother-in-law who helps Lindo travel to the US by giving her money. Thus, she creates a new identity, and finds a job and a new husband. There, she meets An -Mei Hsu who introduces her to Tin Jong, with whom she gets married. They had three children: Winston, Vincent and Waverly.

For Tan, the color red is used to depict specific and diverse ideas. In the Chinese culture, the color red symbolizes marital longevity or good luck. "Tan personalizes the color's cultural significance by using it as a chromatic signifier, especially in Lindo Jong's chapter, 'the Red candle' " (Mussari 78). Tan uses red according to the traditional Chinese manner. At the age of sixteen, on the day of Lindo's wedding, Lindo rides in a red palanquin. She also wears a red wedding dress and an embroidered red scarf on her head. Red banners hang from the Huang House. Here, the color red symbolizes long life and happiness.

By the end of the story, the red candle signifies a different intent: it symbolizes freedom and self-assertion. The red wedding candle, with two ends for lighting, one end bearing Lindo's name and the other for her groom, is a sign of their union. Lindo thinks "that red candle was supposed to seal me forever with my

husband and his family, no excuses afterward" (JLC 59). But in the middle of the night, she blows out her hushand's end of the candle "expect [ing] that if the flame representing her spiritual and physical marital bondage is extinguished, she can live in the hope of eventual freedom" (Wilson 68). The red candle symbolizes Lindo's freedom and identity. Lindo continues to use her power with her children even when they become adults. This had an influence on her daughter's personality and their mother-daughter relationship.

Lindo Jong and Waverly

A similar confrontation happens between Lindo Jong and her daughter Waverly. Waverly learned to play chess in San Fransico's Chinatown and became a national chess champion while still a child. Even though Waverly enjoyed playing chess, she lost her strength after she confronted her mother who boasted of her prowess. Therefore, she told her mother: "I wish you wouldn't do that, telling everybody I'm your daughter....why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn play chess?" (JLC 99).

Tan uses imagery to provide a clearer understanding of a strained relationship between mother and daughter. The chess game is a metaphor that represents the power struggle between mother and daughter. Waverly envisions herself and her mother at a chessboard, her mother is a chief chess opponent and she is the defeatist: with her mother's pieces advancing and her own pieces crying out as they fell from the boat:

In my head, I saw a chessboard with sixty-four black and white squares. Opposite me was my opponent, two angry black slits. She wore a triumphant smile: "strongest wind cannot be seen," she said. Her black men advanced across the plane, slowly marching to each successive level as a single unit.

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My white pieces screamed as they scurried and fell off the board one by one. As her men drew closer to my edge, I felt myself growing light. I rose up into the air and flew out the window...until everything below me disappeared and I was alone. I closed my eyes and pondered my next move.

(JLC 100- 01)

Waverly imagines life as a chess game. In her book, Today's Writers and Their Works: Amy Tan, Mussari says: "Chess teaches Waverly a strategy for survival: the ability to find her invisible strength' and use it against stronger adversaries. Yet, her strongest adversary often seems to be her mother" (59-61). As a strategy, Waverly once did not want to please her mother by her own decision to quit playing chess. When she decided not to participate in a tournament, she expected that her mother would beg her to continue playing, but she was offended and did not say anything except "You think it is so easy. One day quit, next day play. Everything for you is this way. So smart, so easy, so fast" (JLC 171).

Finally, Waverly wanted to play again, her mother said "it is not so easy anymore" (JLC 172). But Waverly continued to play anyway without her mother's support; she lost her chess games and stopped playing entirely:

At my next tournament, while I had done well overall, in the end the points were not enough. I lost. And what was worse, my mother said nothing. She seemed to walk around with this satisfied look, as if it had happened because she had devised this strategy.

Over the next few weeks and later months and years, I continued to play, but never with that same feeling of supreme confidence. (JLC 172-73)

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Waverly is in her thirties, a tax attorney at Price Waterhouse. She is married to Marvin Chen, and has a daughter. Shoshana, who is four years old. Waverly recalls how her mother hated her first husband Marvin, and she accuses her of having poisoned that marriage, Now she is going to marry a Caucasian man, and she does not know how to tell her mother. But when her daughter forces her to say something about him, Lindo has only negative remarks concerning him: first, he has freckles; second, he is unaware of a Chinese table customs; and finally, he does not know how to speak politely to Chinese elders.

Waverly decides to find a chance to bring Rich into her mother's home, but her effort is useless. It is during dinner. Once, Waverly and Rich are invited to have dinner, at a Chinese restaurant. Waverly chooses this restaurant in order to please her mother and make her accept Rich while eating Chinese food. Although Rich uses the "slippery ivory chopsticks" (JLC 178), Rich fails to appreciate Lindo's cooking. When Lindo complains that one of the dishes is not tasty, as is the Chinese custom, Rich not only comments negatively, but also adds a little soy souce to the dish. Waverly felt offended by her mother:

My mother was doing it again, making me see black where I once saw white. In her hands, I always became the pawn. I could only run away. And she was the queen, able to move in all directions, relentless in her pursuit, always able to find my weakest spots. (JLC 179- 80)

Since Rich fails to appreciate Lindo's food, he is not called an insider because "sharing food is held to dignify *togetherness, an equivalence among a group that defines and reaffirms insiders as socially similar" (Mennell, Murcott and Otterlo0 115).

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Waverly decides to tell her mother to stay away from her life. She thinks the only way to avoid her mother is to shut her up. Earlier, when a friend encourages Waverly to stand up to her mother, by telling her to stop ruining her life simply by telling her to shut up, Waverly is shocked: "you can't ever tell a Chinese mother to shut up. You could be charged as an accessory to your own murder" (JLC 173). Guo explains this quotation more accurately:

In Waverly's case, to tell her mother to shut up would probably cause her mother's suicide, since the sole purpose of the traditional Chinese mother's life is to raise and take care of her children. To Waverly's mother, taking care of her children means to speak to them and constantly check up on them. If that purpose were taken away, she would feel that she had no purpose in life. Waverly feels that she can never silence her mother, even though she does not like her mother's nagging about how she should live her life. (42)

Food imagery is used to describe the portrayal of the emotions and feelings Tan's character's, especially between mother-daughter relationships. Perhaps the most striking example is what happens to Waverly in her childhood. When Waverly feels that her mother is using her accomplishments in chess to show-off, she tries to be free from her mother's expectations. This is reflected when Waverly and Lindo contend about the subject on the sidewalk, the daughter runs and knocks into an old woman and causes her to drop all groceries. As Lindo helps the woman by picking up the "escaping food" (JLC 99), she gets angry. But Waverly makes her escape into an alley after another, she finally realizes that she has no "escape routes" (JLC 100).

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When she finally gets back home, she notices that "on a platter were the remains of a large fish, its fleshy head still connected to bones swimming upstream in vain escape" (JLC 100). After this incident, Waverly feels Lindo treats her like "a rotten fish she had thrown away but which had left behind its bad smell" (JLC 170). In her article "food imagery in Amy Tan's the Joy Luck Club and the Kitchen God'Wife," Hsiao says:

Food images indicate Waverly's feelings and situation. When that bag of groceries spills on the street, Waverly sees in the escaping food' her desire to be free from Lindo's expectation. The remains of the large fish, however, ridicule her 'vain escape." The rotten fish image further brings it to light that a disobedient child deserves contempt. (210)

Food is also used by the mothers to express their love and affection towards: their daughters. "Food can be manipulative because it is synonymous with love" (Hsiao 213). This is shown in Waverly's case as she learns in her childhood if she obeys her mother, she will be rewarded with the "forbidden candies" (JLC 89). But if she does not follow her mother's order, she will be ignored and punished. After an argument between Lindo and Waverly, Lindo decides to ignore her daughter as punishment. But when Waverly falls sick and suffers from a fever, Lindo feeds her rice porridge, the daughter becomes so delighted and says: "I was so happy that she [Lindo] had become her usual self" (JLC 172). Lindo's strategy "may be as. powerful a means of control as over-protection" (Sceats 120).

When Lindo decides to join Waverly and Rich in their trip to China, Waverly hates the idea, but at the same time sees it as a good chance to leave their differences behind: "I know what she means. She would love to go to China with us. And I would hate it...yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect

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sense" (JLC 184). Also concerning eating in China, Rich makes Lindo "translate all the menus" for them so that they can avoid "eating snakes or dogs by mistake" (JLC 184). By saying this Rich is not only making a joke, but he also refers to his distrust of the menus. Like Rich, Waverly is also worried about eating in China because it "symbolizes her uncertainty of a satisfactory mother/daughter relationship (Hsiao 222). For Waverly, the idea to have Lindo with them for three weeks is distressing "three weeks' worth of her complaining about dirty chopsticks and cold soup, three meals a day-well, it would be a disaster" (JLC 184).

In the chapter "Double Face," the central motif is a mirror reflecting the theme of a lack of communication between mother and daughter. Because this scene is narrated from Lindo's perspective, it "shows the limits of viewing identification as an issue problematic for the daughter alone" (Heung 599). Lindo is seated in front of a mirror as Waverly and the hairdresser, Mr. Rory, decide what to do with Lindo's hair. Rory assumes that Lindo is a recent immigrant who cannot speak English, but Waverly does not tell him the truth. Waverly continues to translate Mr. Rory's question for her mother, even though Lindo understands English very well. This makes Lindo feel embarrassed of the shame she sees on her daughter's face, "He thinks I do not understand English... I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother but she is not proud of me" (JLC 255). Du Pree points out that "because Lindo's perspective is depicted here, the reader notices how the daughterly behavior infects the mother's attitude towards Americans and Americanism" (32). Despite her silence, Lindo examines closely the interaction between Waverly and Mr. Rory: "Americans don't really look at one another when talking." And also she alternates between her "Chinese face" and her "American face" which is "the face Americans think is Chinese, the one they cannot understand" (JLC 255).

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Waverly shows a complete lack of respect for her mother in more than one way. First, Waverly and Lindo speak through the mirror to each other's reflections. Since speaking through mirrors is an American custom, Lindo, a traditional Chinese woman who is accustomed to the custom of speaking directly to her elders, finds this strange. Second, Waverly critizes her mother's head "as if Lindo were not there." Third and last, Waverly speaks in a loud voice to Lindo "as if [Lindo has] lost [her] hearing" (JLÇ 255). Lindo knows she has made her daughter American. It is her fault as she wanted Waverly to have the best combination possible: American circumstances of free choice and Chinese obedient character. She says "How could I know these two things do not mix?" (JLC 254)

The scene suddenly changes, when Mr. Rory comments that Waverly looks like her mother. Lindo notices Waverly's discomfort, for she does not want to look so Chinese: ""the same cheeks.' [Waverly] says. She points to mine and then pokes her cheeks. She sucks them outside in to look like a starved person" (JLC 256). In her article, Daughter-text/mother-text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Heung writes "Waverly's response exhibits her 'matrophobia,' defind by Adrienne Rich as the daughter's fear of 'becoming one's mother " (600).

Although Lindo is aware of Waverly's negative response, she is moved by their resemblance to her own mother back in China: "the same happiness, the same sadness, the same good fortune, the same faults. I am seeing myself and my mother, back in China, when I was a young girl" (JLC 256). She is reminded of her childhood in China, when she and her own mother had the same form of identification. It is Lindo's sense of ethnic identity, which enables her to close the bridge between past and present and between different cultures (Heung 600-01). The mothers' relationships with their own mothers have influenced the lives of their daughter. Finally, Lindo decides to tell her story of the past to her daughter

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Waverly "It's too late to change you, but I'm telling you this because I worry about your baby. I worry that someday she will [...] forget she had a grandmother" (JLC 49).

Ying-ying St Clair and her mother

Ying-ying St. Clair and her mother share a strong but unstable relationship. Her mother is Ying-ying's object as she is very much involved in her upbringing and personality formation. Ying-ying's story starts with her memory of a childhood in Wushi. It reflects her disconnection from her family. Born into a privileged family, her story begins in the autumn of 1918 when four-year-old Ying-ying was lost and found during the Moon Festival. Ying-ying felt intense pain at the way her own mother left her in the care of her Amah, her nurse. But she also suffered a trauma when she fell off the large boat on which her family was celebrating. No one on the boat noticed, neither her mother nor her substitute mother, her nurse, but she was found by fishermen who considered her as a poor child. Walter Shear describes this scary situation saying:

They attempt to restore her to her family group by hailing a floating pavilion to tell those aboard they have found the lost child. Instead of the family appearing to reclaim her, Ying-Ying sees only strangers and a little girl who shouts, "that's not me ... I'm here. I didn't fall in the water."

What seems a bizarre, comically irrelevant mistake is the most revealing and shocking moment of the story, for it is as if her conscious self has suddenly appeared to deny her, to cast her permanently adrift in a life among strangers. (21)

Chinese tradition states that the Moon Lady will grant one's most secret desire during the Moon Festival and Ying-ying's greatest desire was to be seen and be

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accepted by others.The specific situation here is a metaphor for Ying-ying's life- long predicament. She has spent her entire life forgetting herself and suppressing her own needs; so, in effect, she has lost her own identity. Ying-ying feels as though she has not only lost herseif, she also fears that her daughter Lena is in the same predicament.

Like Lindo, Ying- ying is removed from her natal family through an arrangeu marriage. At the age of sixteen, she was married to Lin Xiao, a vulgar man who impregnates her and leaves her for an opera singer: "I became a stranger to myself. I was pretty for him... I had so much joy the that I came to have so much hate" (JLC 247). As an act of defiance to her husband, she aborts their son. After her abortion, she goes to live with poor cousins for ten years and eventually decides to work as a shop girl. With the lapse of time, she can overcome her grief. Only after knowing that her husband died, she is free to immigrate to the USA, where she meets her future husband Clifford St-Clair, with English-Irish origins. He courts her for four years before she finally accepts to marry him:

So I decided. I decided to let Saint marry me. So easy for me. I was the daughter of my father's wife. I spoke in a trembly voice. I became pale, ill, and more thin, I let myself become a wounded animal. I let the hunter come to me and turn me into a tiger ghost. I willingly gave up my chi, the spirit that caused me so much pain. (JLC 251)

She marries him with neither passion nor joy in life "I neither liked him nor disliked him" (JLC 250). In the immigration papers, Ying-Ying has had a changed identity; her name is no longer "Gu Ying-ying" but "Betty St. Clair," also the birth year is "the wrong birth year, 1916 instead of 1914. So with the sweep of a pen, [Ying-ying] lost her name and became a Dragon instead of a Tiger" (JLC 104).

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Ying-ying cannot associate herself with either Chinese or American because *"Ying-Ying's profound belief in fate and her personal destiny finally led to a policy of submissiveness and even listlessness something that becomes part of her identity" (Golchin 27). Ying- ying's depressed nature forces her to deviate from normal and healthy parenting. This drawback has a harmful effect on Lena's personality. Later on, Ying-ying "becomes lost to herself and with that loss follows a life of passivity and fatalism, a life style that she has unintentionally handed down to her daughter" (Golchin 28).

In Ying- Ying's case, she is hungry for the attention of her mother. Ying-Ying is frustrated that her mother raises her up in a traditional Chinese way that ""A boy can run and chase dragonflies, because that is his nature,' she said. "But a girl should stand still. If you are still for a very long time, a dragonfly will no longer see you. Then it will come to you and hide in the comfort of your shadow."" (JLC 72). In other words, a girl is supposed to be passive and invisible. Ying-ying is extremely dissatisfied with her life as she is taken care of by an Amah, a nursemaid, instead of her mother.

Ying-ying St. Clair and Lena St. Clair

Ying-ying St. Clair is Lena's mother. In Lena's case, there is an attachment to Ying-ying as she is the only parent present. Hence, despite sharing a difficult relationship, Lena identifies to some extent with her mother "I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body. There is a part of her mind that is part of mine" (JLC 242). Ying-ying thinks of herself and Lena as having shared the same body, and as being of the same flesh. In spite of this attachment, Lena's story shows also how she disconnects from Ying-ying "when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life,

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I have watched her as though from another shore" (JLC 242). For Ying-ying, this is a metaphor of Lena's moving away from a Chinese upbringing from birth. Instead, she wants to lead an American life. Ying-ying never talks about her life in China neither to Lena nor to her husband. Lena thinks that her father has saved her mother from a terrible life in China even though the truth is quite the contrary. In reality, Ying-ying is a daughter of a very wealthy family.

Lena's childhood is filled with fear and confusion as a result of her mother's depression and instability. She hoped life would improve when the St. Clair family move to a new apartment. However, just the opposite has happened. "Her mother's anxiety increased because she felt things were out of balance and out of harmony" (Loos 68-69). Ying-ying becomes more troubled and protective of Lena "... while riding on the bus...my mother trembled. She clutched my hand so tightly it hurt" (JLC 108). Lena learns that her mother is pregnant. And this, too, disturbs her mother who "bump into things, into table edges as if she forgot her stomach contained a baby... did not speak of the joys of having a new baby...talked about a heaviness around her" (JLC 109). When Ying-ying loses her baby, she falls apart and is devastated. Feeling guilty of causing the child's death, she appears as a living ghost. Partly, because of that, Lena has apprehensions about herself and her mother. Ying-ying no longer takes care of her daughter (Lena), but instead she starts to see danger in everything "She sees only bad things that affect our family. And she knows what causes them. But now she laments that she never did anything to stop them" (JLC 149). Lena also starts to see nightmares.

Ying-ying teaches Lena to see the world through her eyes. She states that rules and customs associated with eating must be taught to children. This is what Ying- ying does with her daughter Lena in the chapter "Rice Husband." In order to teach Lena not to waste food, Ying-ying tells her that her future husband will have a

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pock mark on his face for every uneaten grain of rice left in her bowl. Ying- ying also tells Lena that a man with pock marks is a mean man. Lena thinks of the twelve-year-old boy, Arnold Reisman, who has marks on his face and is mean also. As Pi-Li Hsiao points out "Ying-ving plays the role of an agent who demands conformity to cultural customs. Ironically, her "strategy" drives Lena to the opposite extreme" (214). This means that, Ying-ying's superstitions have detrimental effects on Lena's personality. For fear that she will marry a pock- marked man; she decides to intentionally leave rice in her bowl so that she can kill him. By doing this, she thinks that she changes her imaginary fate. Five years later, reading the newspaper one morning, her father tells her that Arnold has died of complications from measles. Filled with guilt and now suffering from an eating disorder, Lena gorges on a half-gallon of ice cream and then "retch[es] [it] back into the ice cream container" (JLC 154). When Lena gorges and finishes the food, she obeys her mother (Ying-ying), but when she vomits, she is symbolically trying not to follow her mother's orders by not finishing the food. Lena also continues to say "I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good" (JLC 154). Lena is in fear of becoming irrational and emotionally unbalanced like her mother. As a result of Ying-ying's upbringing, it becomes part of Lena to be aware of Chinese eating customs.

In Lena's case, she is hungry because she feels that Ying-ying immerses her in an environment full of fear and despair. Lena is extremely traumatized by Ying- ying's troubled mental state. This is due to Ying-ying's revelation of a side of herself that has surprised Lena:

So I will tell Lena of my shame. That I was rich and pretty. I was too good for any one man. That I became abandoned goods. I will tell her that at

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eighteen the prettiness drained from my cheeks. That I thought of throwing myself in the lake like the other ladies of shame. And I will tell her of the baby I killed because I came to hate this man so much. When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming, she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear. (JLC 248)

Besides, Lena is frustrated of Ying-ying's poor command of English. Thus, she is forced to act as a translator for her parents because her mother speaks little English and her father does not speak Chinese. Being a translator is a difficult task for Lena. When Lena's mother says something that may embarrass Lena's father, she will mistranslate what her mother says. For instance, when Ying-ying loses her baby and falls apart, Lena does not translate for her father exactly what her mother says in order to preserve family harmony because "she was concerned her mother was crazy and did not want to let her father know this" (Loos 69-70). Lena thinks that her mother is crazy because she does not know anything about her mother's past. She is extremely dissatisfied with her life because her mother is too Chinese for her liking. Instead, she desires to lead an American life that is not bound by superstitions or strict traditions.

Lena sees her mother as abusive and controlling trying to ruin her life. Lena is thirty-four years old and is married to Harold Livotny. When she decides to marry Harold, she says. "My mother had looked in my rice bowl and told me I would marry a bad man" (JLC 151). Lena is annoyed because her mother predicts her future only in a negative light. She has helped her husband to establish a successful architectural firm where he is a partner, and she is an associate, "but fails to

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recognize her value as a wife or to reward her for supporting his career" (Snodgrass 101). Lena does not see her own value in spite of her efforts and creativity that make Harold shine at work. Instead, she accepts her role like a traditional Chinese wife who lets her husband decide everything. At work, he is the boss who treats everyone else equally except his wife. In the household, Harold decides everything. For instance, the costs of everything are divided between them even though Harold earns seven times more than Lena's. "In her mother's opinion, Lena and Harold are shallow materialists spending their money for show rather than for personal pleasure" (Snodgrass 101).The researcher describes this kind of marriage as "a sham" marriage (JLC 156).

Tan uses symbols in order to show the chasm that divides mothers from daughters. For Ying-ying, the vase upon a wobbly table in the guest room is a symbol of Lena's unstable marriage. During her visit to Lena's house, Ying-ying sits in a small guest room which, in Chinese ways of thinking, should have been the best room in the house. When Lena's mother touches the table, the table falls down and the vase also breaks on the fioor. When Lena goes to rescue her mother, she tells her mother that she "knew it would happen" (JLC 165): Her mother simply asks her then "why you don't stop it" (JLC 165). From the reciprocal conversation between Ying-ying and Lena, one can deduce that Ying-ying accidently causes the vase to break in order to tell Lena that she should prevent đisasters before they happen. Moreover, the "it" here connotes that the marriage is out of balance. Some critics see that both of Harold and Lena are responsible for their shattering marriage. Selena Ward, Mannheimer and Freidberg assume that:

It was Lena's husband, Harold, who built the wobbly table when he was first studying architecture and design. If one takes this information of similarly symbolic, one might say that the precariousness of the marriage may result

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from Harold's failure to be "supportive" enough, "solid" enough in his commitment...Lena too, is to blame: as with the vase, Lena realizes that her marriage is in danger of shattering, but she refuses to take action. (23).

Ying-ying does not want Lena to repeat her mistake of remaining passively silent. But. ironically, Lena turns out not only to be passive but also loses her sense of identity just like her mother. So. Lena's mother blames herself twice. Firstly, at the beginning of the chapter "The Moon Lady":

For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quit for so long now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordles phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid.

All these years I kept my true nature hidden,...

And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others. (JLC 67)

Secondly, in the chapter titled "Waiting between the Trees," she later regrets having no chi (spirit) to pass on to her daughter Lena "I willingly gave up my chi, the spirit that caused me so much pain" (JLC 251).Therefore, she decides to relate her own past to Lena because this has a positive effect on Lena's character formation: "Now I must tell my daughter everything. That she is the daughter of a ghost. She has no chi. This is my greatest shame. How can I leave this world without leaving her my spirit?" (JLC 252). The chi, referred to by Ying-ying. is explained by Walter Shear as follows:

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The chi that she refers to may be impossible to render wholly into English, but it involves a fundamental self- respect, a desire to excel, a willingness to stand up for one's self and one's family, to demonstrate something to others. It may well be quality that the daughters in the book lack or that they possess in insufficient amounts. (22)

Ying-ying is annoyed from seeing Lena as having no chi. Ying-ying's decision to tell Lena about her past is motivated by her desire to teach Lena a lesson that is to warn her against the passivity and fatalism that she has suffered throughout her life. Then, Lena comes to understand that Ying-ying loves her greatly.

Tan uses the image of the tiger in order to reinforce the role of the mothers in the identity formation of the daughters such as Ying-ying and Lena. According to Chinese astrology, the tiger is a creature of force, with two natures "gold and black...The gold side leaps with its fierce heart, The black side stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come" (JLC 248). Ying-ying fears that her daughter Lena, who was also born under the sign of the tiger, also lacks the spirit that should be hers by right of her birth year. Ying-ying realizes that "she must face the pain of her past and communicate it to her daughter so as to supply Lena with the personal and cultural knowledge of her mother's life that she has always lacked" (Hamilton 141).

Ying-ying is going to confront her past in order to regain her spirit. One can say that this pain will free her spirit, so she can cut her daughter's spirit free. Like a tiger, Ying-ying sits and waits for her daughter. When "she tells Lena her story for the first time, [she] hop[es] that she might learn from her mother's own failure to take initiative and instead come to express her thoughts and feelings" (Golchin 30).

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By narrating and sharing her painful secret past with Lena, she cuts Lena's tiger spirit loose. Ying-ying helps herself to confront her own painful past; she also manages to help Lena to see the problems in marriage and to confront them. Ying- ying and Lena will reconstruct their identities. This is relevant to the object relations theory which emphasizes the influence of primary caregivers. Ying-ying participates actively in determining the course of Lena's character development:

I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. (JLC 252)

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