Joy Luck Club 2
CHINESE-AMERICAN WOMEN IN AMERICAN CULTURE
In Amy Tan's novel, The Joy Luck Club, there is one episode, "Waiting Between the Trees," illustrating major concerns facing Chinese-American women. Living with their traditional culture in American society, Chinese-American women suffer the problems of culture conflicts. While their American spouses are active and assertive, they are passive and place their happiness entirely on the goodness of their husbands. At one time, this passiveness can be seen as a virtue; at other time, it is a vice or a weakness. In studying the lives of two personalities, Ying-Ying and Lena St. Clair, a Chinese mother and a half-Chinese daughter, one can see these ...
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Her love for him turned to hate, and she killed her unborn baby. This act gave her remorse for all her life since she considered it a murder. Tortured by this incident, she had a mental breakdown, for a period of time, when her second son -- with her second husband, St. Clair -- died at birth. She saw it as a punishment for her previous behavior.
After leaving her first husband's house and returning home, she abandoned herself to whatever life offered her. She lived like a shadow, letting other people or events to decide for her. When she met St. Clair, she passively let him believe that she was from a poor family. Ying-Ying also let him think that he married her to save her from some catastrophe, since she seemed to be in a desperate state of mind when she married him. She could not tell her husband, and later, her daughter Lena, that the catastrophe they imagined was only the news of the death of her bad and unloving former husband, and the emptiness she felt after hearing that ...
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chose American ways, not realizing that her Chinese family education and tradition are really important to her happiness as well. Children learn to act as their parents do before them. The relationship between Ying-Ying and St. Clair was superficial, so is that of Lena and Harold, her husband. Lena never questioned her mother about Chinese tradition, or about her parents' relationship.
Despite the exterior resemblance between the two marriages, Harold is very different from his father-in-law. While St. Clair was an honest man who courted Ying-Ying for four years before marrying her, and he did not abandon her when she had her breakdown, Harold seems to be more egotistical and ...
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"Joy Luck Club 2." Essayworld.com. March 2, 2004. Accessed November 30, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Joy-Luck-Club-2/3930.
"Joy Luck Club 2." Essayworld.com. March 2, 2004. Accessed November 30, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Joy-Luck-Club-2/3930.
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