1050 Tan, Amy
they reveal that one thing all of the women have in
common is how constrained they feel their lives have
been because they are women, despite the fact that
the mothers were raised in mid-20th-century China
and the daughters were raised in 1960s and 1970s
America. The stories of the Joy Luck Club’s four
mothers and four daughters reveal the difficulties
of life in America for those whose gender, social
class, and race intersect to create conflicting self-
identities as well as clashing societal expectations.
Carman Curton
abandonment in The Joy Luck Club
Suyuan Woo’s abandonment of her infant twin
daughters in World War II China is the frame story
that holds together the tales of the Joy Luck Club’s
members as well as the stories told by their daugh-
ters. Although Suyuan’s third daughter, Jing-mei
( June) Woo, learns about her mother’s loss of the
twins when she is a child, the story feels like a deep
and dangerous secret between the two. Jing-mei does
not discover that Suyuan left the daughters for their
own well-being until she is an adult. Sadly Suyuan
herself is dead by the time news that the daughters
are still alive arrives in a letter from a friend in China.
After an argument during which Jing-mei cru-
elly tells her mother she wishes she were dead like
the two girls in China, it would be natural for her
to spend the rest of her childhood fearing literal,
physical abandonment of herself as well. However,
what Jing-mei actually feels is that her mother has
abandoned her hope that her only surviving daugh-
ter would someday be a prodigy, would become
extraordinary in some way. And this small emotional
abandonment shapes the rest of the stories Jing-mei
tells throughout The Joy Luck Club.
Each of the surviving three mothers and four
daughters of the Joy Luck Club is also damaged
in one way or another by having been physically or
emotionally abandoned. The Joy Luck Club moth-
ers—Lindo Jong, An-mei Hsu, and Ying-ying St.
Clair—endure being left behind by their families
or husbands. Heartbreakingly, Lindo and An-mei
are also separated from loved ones “for their own
good” after their families suffer very different trag-
edies. Ying-ying, though, is simply left by a husband
who only marries her for her dowry and leaves her,
pregnant and humiliated, while he carries on with
other women.
Although the Joy Luck Club daughters, born and
raised in America, are not subject to arranged mar-
riages and the physical abandonment their mothers
endured in China decades earlier, each daughter
suffers perceived emotional desertion, which shapes
the rest of her life. Waverly’s self-confidence is
badly shaken after her mother withdraws her belief
in Waverly’s talent as a chess prodigy. The guilt
resulting from a single mistake that allows Rose
Hsu Jordan’s brother to drown while she is watching
him makes her pathologically indecisive. Lena St.
Clair is clearly the most emotionally abandoned of
the Joy Luck daughters. As her mother grieves her
own losses and suffers from postpartum depression,
she is often paranoid and delusional and can offer
Lena little physical comfort or emotional support
throughout her childhood.
In addition to these physical and emotional
desertions, each character also realizes that she has
given up her own hopes and dreams. The mothers
are also doubly wounded when they realize that they
must also relinquish the futures they had imagined
for their daughters. Even though their daughters are
free of the restrictive roles imposed on women in
1940s China, the mothers believe they have disre-
garded the wisdom of Chinese tradition and that
their sacrifice has not brought them happy, carefree
lives in return.
Although The Joy Luck Club may appear on the
surface to be the tale of a series of tragic events, the
last quarter of the book reveals a series of reconcilia-
tions between the mothers and daughters portrayed
there. These chapters reveal that the greatest tragedy
is to abandon one’s self. The book’s message is that
if the daughters deny their Chinese heritage, reject-
ing their mothers’ traditions, then they reject the
reality of their dual Chinese and American cultures,
and thus they will abandon their own selves. In the
final chapter, Jing-mei remembers denying that she
would ever feel and think “Chinese,” asserting that
even if she was Chinese on the outside, she was
surely as Caucasian as her high school friends on
the inside—a sentiment each daughter expresses in
some way during the course of the novel. It is only
after meeting the “abandoned” twin daughters for