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Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction
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Generational Differences and

the Diaspora in The Joy Luck
Club
a
Walter Shear
a
Pittsburg (Kansas) State University , USA
Published online: 09 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Walter Shear (1993) Generational Differences and the Diaspora
in The Joy Luck Club , Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 34:3, 193-199, DOI:
10.1080/00111619.1993.9933826

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1993.9933826

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 Generational Differences and the
Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club

WALTERSHEAR
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Orv i l l e Schell’s review of The Joy Luck Club for the New York Times emphasizes
that those millions of Chinese who were part of the diaspora of World War I1 and
the fighting that resulted in the triumph of the Communists were subsequently cut
off from the mainland and after 1949 left to fend for themselves culturally (3:l).
Though Schell is struck by the way this book renders the vulnerability of these
Chinese women in America, the novel’s structure in fact succeeds in manifesting
not merely the individual psychic tragedies of those caught up in this history, but
the enormous agony of a culture enmeshed in a transforming crisis. What each
person’s story conveys is the terror of a vulnerable human consciousness tom and
rent in a culture’s contortions; and although, like other Chinese-American books,
this novel articulates “the urge to find a usable past,” it is made up of a series of
intense encounters in a kind of cultural lost and found (Lim 57).
The structure that presents this two-fold impression recalls works such as Sher-
wood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Wil-
liam Faulkner’s The Unvunquished, books that feature distinct, individual narra-
tives but that as a group simultaneously dramatize the panorama of a critical
transition in cultural values. In The Joy Luck Club Tan organizes her material in
terms of a generational contrast by segregating stories of mothers and their daugh-
ters. The separate story sections are divided into four parts with mother figures
telling two stones, mostly concerned with their past in pre-1949 China, and their
daughters telling two stories, one about growing up and one about a current family
situation. The exception to this pattern is Jing-mei Woo, the daughter of the
founder of the Joy Luck Club, who narrates a story in each of the four sections
and who adds additional continuity by narrating the first and last section. Though
all these people, for the most part, know one another, few of the stones involve
contacts with anyone outside the immediate family group. While the daughters’
stones usually involve their mothers, the mothers’ stories tend to feature a distinct

SPRING 1993, VOL. XXXIV, NO.3 193

 life, involving rather rigid family experiences in old China and their current rela-
tionship to their American daughters. By using the perspectives of both mothers
and daughters, Tan initially seems to solve what Linda Hunt, examining Maxine
Hong Kingston, describes as a basic problem for a Chinese-American woman:
“being simultaneously insider (a person who identifies strongly with her cultural
group) and outsider (deviant and rebel against that tradition), she cannot figure
out from which perspective to speak” (6).
Nevertheless, just as in The Woman Warrior; the communication bamer here is
a double one, that between generations and that created by the waning influence
of an older culture and the burgeoning presence of another. Jing-mei announces
in the first section: “My mother and I never really understood one another. We
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translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said,
while my mother heard more” (37). Generally, the daughters tend to perceive
cultural blanks, the absence of clear and definite answers to the problems of fam-
ily, whereas the mothers tend to fill in too much, often to provide those kinds of
cultural answers and principles that seem to empower them to make strong do-
mestic demands on their daughters. Thus, as in Woman Warrior; the object of
“confrontation” for a daughter is often the mother, “the source of authority for her
and the most single powerful influence from China” (Wang 30).
The mothers tend to depict themselves as, in a broad sense, students learning
about the social realities around them and using their experiences to come to
conclusions about essential forms of character strength and weakness. For exam-
ple, one of the mothers, An-mei Hsu, seems to see in her own mother’s suicide
how to use the world for her own advantage. She not only traces how her mother
makes the Chinese cultural beliefs work for her-“suicide is the only way a
woman can escape marriage and gain revenge, to come back as a ghost and scatter
tea leaves and good fortune” (234)-but also she realizes almost immediately the
acute significance of the words of her mother who tells her “she [the mother]
would rather kill her own weak spirit so she could give me a stronger one” (240).
Ying-ying St. Clair claims, “I have always known a thing before it happens”
(243). Her daughter tends to confirm at least an ironic version of her mother’s
acquired powers by adding, “She sees only bad things that affect our family”
(149). In at least one case the mother’s knowledge is a gift passed to the daughter:
Waverly Jong opens her story by claiming, “I was six when my mother taught me
the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect from
others, and eventually, though none of us knew it at the time, chess games” (89).
In the last case the knowledge apparently blossoms from the mother’s folk saying,
“Bite back your tongue” (89), and although Waverly regards it as a secret of her
success in chess, she herself is finally a victim of her mother’s more authoritarian
deployment of the tactic, as it suddenly takes the form of simply ignoring her.
As the last interaction demonstrates, there is nearly always some tension in the
exchange between mother and daughter, between old China and the new Ameri-
can environment. Most often the focus is either on a mother, who figures out her

194 CRITIQUE
 world, or on the daughters, who seem caught in a sophisticated cultural trap,
knowing possibilities rather than answers, puzzling over the realities that seem to
be surrounding them and trying to find their place in what seems an ambivalent
world. Strangely, given the common problems presented, there is little concern
with peer communication among the daughters. Jing-mei explains, “Even though
Lena and I are still friends, we have grown naturally cautious about telling each
other too much. Still, what little we say to one another often comes back in an-
other guise. It’s the same old game, everybody talking in circles” (38). This diffi-
culty in communication may simply be a consequence of living in what Schell
describes as an “upwardly mobile, design-conscious, divorce-prone’’ world (28),
but it also tends to convey a basic lack of cultural confidence on the part of the
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daughters and thus a sense of their being thrown back into the families they have
grown up in for explanations, validations, and identity reinforcement and defi-
nition.
Again, in the tradition of The Woman Warrior; The Joy Luck Club explores the
subtle, perhaps never completely understood, influence of culture on those just
beginning to live it. The mother-daughter tensions are both the articulation of the
women’s movement and the means of specifying the distinctness of Chinese and
Chinese-American culture. As in Woman Warrior; behind the overt culture is an
odd intuition of a ghost presence, at times a sense of madness waiting at the edge
of existence. It is an unseen terror that runs through both the distinct social spec-
trum experienced by the mothers in China and the lack of such social definition
in the daughters’ lives. In this context the Joy Luck Club itself is the determination
to hope in the face of constantly altering social situations and continually shifting
rules. The club is formed during the Japanese invasion of China, created by Jing-
mei’s mother as a deliberate defiance of the darkness of current events. With a
mixture of desperation and frivolity, she and a group of friends meet, eat, laugh,
tell stories, and play mahjong. She reasons, “we could hope to be lucky. That
hope was our only joy” (25). “It’s not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We
were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for
something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable” (24).
It is the old China experience that manifests most definitely the enormous
weight of fate in the lives of the characters. On the one hand, the constrictive
burden is due to the position of women in that society. An-mei seems to regard
the woman’s role as an inescapable fate: “I was raised the Chinese way; I was
taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitter-
ness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the
same way. . . . 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” (215). Another mother, Lindo Jong, is the victim of a mar-
riage arranged when she was only a child. In her struggle to extricate herself from
the situation, she does not blame her family who made such arrangements bui the
society, the town where she grew up, a place she claims is frozen in custom at a

SPRING 1993, VOL. XXXIV, NO. 3 195

 time when the rest of China was beginning to change. Although the old culture
places the family at its heart. as the experience of the women in this revolutionary
situation demonstrates, its attitude toward women begins in the more fluid modem
world to tear away at this fundamental unit, making the difficulty of mother-
daughter bonding a crucial problem for the culture as a whole.
Ying-ying St. Clair blames herself more than her circumstances, but it is her
early social circumstances that structure the experience that so haunts her and
cripples her psychically. Situated higher in the social scale of old China than the
other members of the club, she seems to fall as a child into a subconscious state
from which she never fully recovers, a state that in the social context may stand
as a paradigm for individual nightmare in a fragmenting culture. Hers is an epi-
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sode with a fantasy/folk flavor and a motif ofdreaming, which seems to represent
a naive, open but mechanical relationship to culture-opposed to a vital reciproc-
ity of being. Ying-ying (the childhood nickname here may be intended to suggest
the regressive nature of her trauma) describes her adventures on a boat cruise
during the Moon festival, which in her account becomes a symbolic episode, a
psychological drifting from the fundamental reality of family. While everyone
else sleeps, the little Ying-ying watches in fascination as some boys use a bird
with a metal ring around its neck to catch fish. The bird serves its purpose, catch-
ing the fish but being unable to swallow them, its social function thus symboli-
cally dependent on an intensely personal, intensely perverse individual frus-
tration.
Finally the boys leave, but Ying-ying stays, “as if caught in a good dream,” (76)
to watch “a sullen woman” clean fish and cut off the heads of chickens and turtles.
As she begins to come back to self-consciousness, she notices that her fine party
clothes are covered with the mess of these deaths-“spots of bloods, flecks of
fish scales, bits of feather and mud” (76). In the strangeness of her panic, she tries
to cover the spots by painting her clothes with the turtle’s blood. When her Amah
appears, the servant is angry and strips off her clothes, using words that the child
has never heard but from which she catches the sense of evil and, significantly,
the threat of rejection by her mother. Left in her underwear, Ying-ying is alone at
the boat’s edge, suddenly looking at the moon, wanting to tell the Moon Lady her
‘‘secret wish.” At this key moment in her young life, she falls into the water and
is about to be drowned when miraculously she finds herself in a net with a heap
of squirming fish. The fishing people who have saved her are of a class known to
her, but a group from which she has previously been shielded. After some initial
insensitive jokes about catching her, 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 strang-
ers and a little girl who shouts, “That’s not me. . . . I’m here. I didn’t fall in the
water” (79).
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 ap-

196 CRITIQUE
 peared to deny her, to cast her permanently adrift in a life among strangers. To
some degree this acute psychic sense of and fear of being abandoned by their
family is a basic reality for all the mothers in this book, each of whose stories
involve a fundamental separation from family, an ultimate wedge of circum-
stances between mother and child.
Though Ying-ying is finally restored to her family, the shock of separation has
become too intense a reality. She tries to explain, “even though I was found-
later that night after Amah, Baba, Uncle, and the others shouted for me along
the waterway-I never believed my family found the same girl” (82). Her self-
accusations at the beginning of this story become a miniature autobiography: “For
all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And
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because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me. . . . I
kept my true nature hidden . . .” (67). Later she accuses herself of becoming a
ghost: “I willingly gave up my chi, the spirit that caused me so much pain” (251).
She fears that this abandonment of self has in some way been passed on to her
daughter. “Now,” she announces to herself, “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?’ (252). Her first narra-
tive ends with her trapped in the legendary world of old China, still a child but
with all the temble insight into her later life: “I also remember what I asked the
Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found” (83).
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
a quality that the daughters in the book lack, or that they possess in insufficient
amounts. Veronica Wang states, “In the traditional Chinese society, women were
expected to behave silently with submission but act heroically with strength. They
were both sub-women and super-women” (24). Possibly those cultural expecta-
tions, although almost totally erased in American culture, could still survive in
residual roles when validated by a concept such as chi.
Whereas the major problem for the older generation had been the struggle
against fate, the younger generation perceives their essential difficulty to involve
the making of choices. The problem, as Rose Hsu Jordan defines it, is that
America offers too many choices, “so much to think about, so much to decide.
Each decision meant a turn in another direction” (191). Like their mothers, many
of the daughters are moving out or thinking of moving out, of family relation-
ships, but such moves involve decisions about divorce, about whether their mar-
riages are working out, about whether their husbands or future husbands fit into
their lives.
One group of stories concerning the daughters features the struggle for matur-
ity, a rather typical generational tension with the mothers. Perhaps surprisingly,
the older women are for the most part not portrayed as pushing their daughters
into an outmoded or inappropriate set of values and traditions, but they do insist

SPRING 1993, VOL. XXXIV, NO. 3 197

 on a basic cultural formulation. Lindo Jong’s comments express a typical attitude:
“I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and
Chinese character” (254). This sounds a note of compromise, but in reply to her
daughter’s declaration, “I’m my own person,” she thinks, “How can she be her
own person? When did I give her up?’ (254).
Curiously, in two instances, the generational tensions appear to have their ori-
gins in what seems a very American ambition. Waverly feels that her mother
leeches off her chess achievements with an appropriating pride, and Jing-mei
feels her mother, inspired by a competition with Waverly’s mother as well as the
belief that in America you could be anything you wanted, pushes her beyond her
abilities, at least beyond her desires, The familiar cry “You want me to be some-
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one that I’m not!” accelerates to “I wish I wasn’t your daughter. I wish you weren’t
my mother.” and finally to “I wish I’d never been born! . . . I wish I were dead!
Like them” (142). The “them” are the other daughters her mother had been forced
to abandon in China (142). This story of Jing-mei moves toward the kind of muted
conclusion typical of most of the daughter stories: “unlike my mother, I did not
believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me” (142). There is
the sense that this “me” lacks some vital centering, the cultural force that would
provide its chi.
In the context of cultural analysis, the happiness of the conclusion seems only
partially earned by what has preceded it. And the fact that the return and the
reunion with the two half-sisters reflect almost exactly the author’s own experi-
ence suggests that there may be more than a little biographical intrusion here (Lew
23). Ultimately, however, the book’s final cultural argument seems to be that there
is always a possibility for the isolated “me” to return home. At one time Jing-mei
notes, “in a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family”
(198). As she makes the return trip to China in the last story, she feels she is at
last becoming Chinese. What she discovers in her reunion with her Chinese half-
sisters, in her father’s story of her mother’s separation from these children and
from the mother’s first husband, and in the photograph of her and her sisters is a
renewed sense of her dead mother. The mother’s living presence in them is the
feeling Jing-mei has been searching for, the feeling of belonging in her family
and of being at last in the larger family of China. In this case the feeling of cultural
wholeness grows out of and seems dependent on a sense of family togetherness,
but the return to the mainland certainly suggests a larger symbolic possibility,
one, however, that must still cope with the actual barriers of geography, politics,
and cultural distinctness.
In contrast to the treatments of generational differences in earlier books such
as Fifrh Chinese Daughter; both Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan are empow-
ered by current feminist ideas in their examinations of the Chinese-American
woman’s dilemma. In both The Woman Warrior and The Joy Luck Club, much of
the focus springs out of the mother-daughter relationships and the way the dias-
pora has created a total contrast in the experiences of mother and daughter. King-

198 CRITIQUE
 ston’s influential book tends to sort out the problems of a single “I” persona and
is thus sharper in its dramatizations of the varied identity strands of a single indi-
vidual, whereas Tan’s multiplicity of first person narratives establishes a broader
canvas with more feeling of fictional detachment between the reader and “I” and
creates a voice for both generations. Both these authors testify to a rupture in the
historical Chinese family unit as a result of the diaspora, but both seem to believe
in a cultural healing. However, as her conclusion suggests, Tan seems to place
more emphasis on the Chinese identity as the healing factor. Although perspec-
tives are difficult to come by with contemporary work, the ability of both Kingston
and Tan to render the experience of a culture through vividly dramatic individual
narratives provides a sound basis for what seems to be a developing tradition of
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Chinese-American women’s writing.

PITTSBURG (KANSAS) STATE UNIVERSITY

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1989: 123.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Twelve Asian American Writers in Search of Self-Definition.’’ Melus 13
( I 986): 57-77.
Schell, Orville. Rev. of The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan.New York Times I9 March 1989: VII 3: I , 28.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Clrrh. New York: Putnam’s, 1989.
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