The Misunderstanding on An-Mei’s Family issues in “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan

 AURORA SOFIAYASMIN SM (30802300007)

The novel "The Joy Luck Club" was written by Amy Tan. The story of family issues is told in the book from An-Mei Hsu's perspective. In the novel, An-Mei Hsu is the daughter of a woman who was forced to become a wealthy man's fourth wife in order to survive. An-Mei was raised by her grandmother, Popo, after being separated from her mother when she was small. An-Mei evolves into a strong woman who learns to overcome past traumas and finds strength in herself as a mother. This review will clarify the novel's ongoing impact and significance in modern debates of sacrifice, family conflicts, and bonding by evaluating Tan's storytelling strategies.

Amy Tan is an American author that was born on February 29, 1953 in Oakland, California, U.S. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants, John Tan and Daisy Tan. Tan has studied in college several times, and now she has earned bachelor's and master's degrees in language and linguistics at San Jose State University.

Besides The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan also has another well-known and best-selling work, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991). This novel has themes of family, culture, and identity that focus on the experiences of women in Chinese-American immigrants. Amy Tan has received several awards, one of them is the "Commonwealth Gold Award" for her influence in American literature.

An-Mei Hsu is a story about the various emotions associated with sacrifices and miscommunications in mother-daughter relationships. Amy Tan illustrates the complexity of family relationships, especially between mothers and daughters, in this story. Tan demonstrates in this story that a mother's sacrifice is an enduring sort of love, even if it is not always acknowledged. In this story, An-Mei was reared in Chinese culture, where she was taught to repress her own desires and suffer for her family's sake. This is where the misunderstanding started from, since An-Mei believed everything she was taught was full of sorrow and sacrifice, but she didn't realize it was all done with love.

She cried, "No choice! No choice!" She doesn't know. If she doesn't speak, she is  making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever.

I know this, because I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness.

And 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. (p. 1)

           Amy Tan delves into the depths of the mother-daughter bond by demonstrating how, due to cultural differences, sacrifice is often difficult to comprehend. The misunderstanding that comes from mothers' mothering and how it is perceived by their daughters demonstrates that, while a mother's sacrifice may appear to be a burden or a source of misery, it is also a magnificent and unspoken statement of love.

            Amy Tan demonstrates the complexities of recognizing a mother's sacrifice and how it is sometimes overlooked or misinterpreted by daughters. An-Mei never realized at the time that all of these sacrifices were made out of love since she was raised in a Chinese culture that taught her to repress her own desires and sacrifice happiness in order to defend her family. Because of this misunderstanding, a gap develops between mother and daughter, and sacrifices that seem like a hardship or a burden end up being manifestations of intense, unsaid love.