Joy Luck Club

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Paulina Cajigal Salwa Jamil December 9, 2011 Period 9/10 “My mom is a never-ending song in my heart…I may sometimes forget the words, but I always remember the tune,” Graycie Harmon once said. Mothers play a significant role in their daughters’ lives, whether their bonds are strong or weak. Often times, through the differences between them, these bonds are tested by the mothers and daughters themselves. Despite the complications that arise within mother-daughter relationships and the differences that set them apart, the paths of mothers and daughters are still interwoven. In other words, regardless of where their paths may lead, daughters will inevitably find their way back to their mothers. Within The Joy Luck Club, Suyuan and Jing-mei Woo, An-Mei and Rose Hsu, Lindo and Waverly Jong, and Ying-Ying and Lena St. Clair work to epitomize the multi-faceted relationships of mothers and daughters. Although these mother-daughter pairings have their own internal struggles, each relationship illustrates how the daughters see their mothers as over-bearing and the mothers see their daughters as distant from them. This distance, portrayed culturally and generationally, brings forth the central conflict between mothers and daughters. But through the in-depth look of each woman’s story and concepts of role-reversal and greater understanding, these maternal connections progress as the novel does. The daughters, regardless of their past relationships with their mothers, find ways to return to their interwoven and complex paths. Throughout the novel, author Amy Tan depicts the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships and the lengths some women will go in order to break cultural barriers and mend generation gaps. In The Joy Luck Club, one of the major conflicts is the existence of cultural barriers, which is depicted through the mothers’ stories and their daughters’

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