Matrilineage in The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is an amazing story which uses monologues to tell the stories of 8 women, mothers and daughters, all Chinese, who live in San Francisco.  A major theme throughout is the importance of culture and identity as expressed through monologues from the women in the story and makes for an interesting read because the Chinese culture is a patriarchal society, where power flows from father to son, not mother to daughter.  In her article, “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage In Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club,” Marina Heung states, "Because of their historical devaluation, women in the Chinese family are regarded as disposable property or detachable appendages despite their crucial role in maintaining the family line through childbearing" (par. 11).  Basically, despite women being the child bearers of the sons which will grow into men, they are reduced to being less important and having nearly no worth or value.  What makes this novel interesting is that the mothers try to hold on to their first culture, which treated them so cruelly, despite being integrated within a second culture in America while teaching their daughters to identify with their Chinese heritage.  Through the monologues, the main lessons that can be learned are the matrilineal relationships between the Chinese mothers and their American daughters, the importance of handing down the culture and history of the mothers to the next generation, and the search for identity among these two differing cultures for both mothers and daughters.

To begin, one of the key factors in The Joy Luck Club is the matrilineage of mothers and daughters.  The story itself is woven around each pair of mothers and daughters and the stories shift from person to person so that the reader can understand each woman's history and why they are the way they are. With the article "Negotiating The Geography of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan's 'The Joy Luck Club,'" Michelle Wood states, “Tan’s dedication of the book, “To my mother and the memory of her mother,” suggests that the mother-daughter relationships the text portrays in China provide a critical framework from which to analyze the mother-daughter relationships in the United States” (82-83).  Because the mothers of the story were raised in China and faced difficulties because they were born female, they all want to keep their daughters from experiencing the same troubles.  In America, the daughters aren't taught the Chinese way, but are expected to be Chinese regardless. 

Stephen Souris says in his article, "'Only Two Kinds of Daughters': Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in the Joy Luck Club," that "Each mother hopes to establish a closer relationship by telling her [daughter] a story. And each mother is shown with a story to tell. Each mother offers the second installment of her life story" (par. 33).  Each daughter carries the burden of their mother's personal tragedies that occurred when the mothers were younger, even if they do not know what burden it is they carry.  They only feel burdened by a mother they cannot understand.  Patricia Hamilton explains in her article "Feng Shui, Astrology, and the Five Elements: Traditional Chinese Belief in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club," that,

The same spirit of individualism that seems so liberating to the older women makes their daughters resistant to maternal advice and criticism. Born into a culture in which a multiplicity of religious beliefs flourishes and the individual is permitted, even encouraged, to challenge tradition and authority, the younger women are reluctant to accept their mothers' values without question. (par. 3) 

Each daughter chooses her own path in a way that the mothers never could when growing up in China and it is through this individualism that the daughters can question anything without the fears their mothers felt when in China. 

 For one of the daughters, Lena St. Clair says in the story "Rice Husband," "To this day, I believe my mother has the mysterious ability to see things before they happen" (Tan 149).  Because Lena believes this, she appears hesitant to show her mother her new house with her husband, "Knowing that there is something wrong with the rigid policy she and Harold follow of sharing all costs equally, she is afraid her mother will confront her with a truth she does not want to admit" (Souris par. 29).  With Lena's mother, Ying-ying, Lena is uncertain whether to trust her mother's instincts, and is afraid to even ask the questions of herself because she knows in her heart that her marriage is flawed, but does not see any way out of it.  Because of Ying-ying's history, she sees the same flaws in her daughter's husband as she saw in her own first husband, and so shares with Lena her own story.  Ben Xu says in his article, "Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club," "the mother does all this not in the capacity of a self-righteous mother, but as a co-victim who has managed to survive" (13), which is to show the daughter that she too can survive. 

With these matrilineal relationships occurring within the story, the reader can recognize the importance of culture to the mothers and the passing down of their culture, as well as their family heritage, to their daughters so that they can understand one another, in the hopes of bridging the gap that exists between the Chinese born mothers and American born daughters.  "The mother-daughter relationships in both China and the United States represented in The Joy Luck Club not only provide a link between the past and the present but also suggest how the ability, or the inability, for mother and daughters to share geographically informed cultural stories influences both mother-daughter relationships and individual and cultural identity" (Wood 83).  Because of the inability to link the past to the present, the mothers try to relate their stories to their daughter's lives to help the daughters understand where they come from, not to make the daughters become like them, but to give them the opportunities they themselves never had.  In the novel, An-mei Hsu admits that she tried to raise her daughter, Rose, the opposite of the way that she was raised, "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" (Tan 215).

Despite the similarities between the mothers and daughters, "the narrative makes the reader poignantly aware of the distance between each mother and daughter by showing the unbridged gap between them and the potential for sharing and communication that is only partially realized" (Souris par. 33).  The mothers speak a broken form of English, combining it with their native Chinese, the main language spoken in the home.  The daughters all understand Chinese, but speak English exclusively to differentiate themselves from their mothers (Heung par. 25).  How effective can this form of communication be between the generational distances, though?

Another question is how effectively maternal language functions as a medium of transmission between generations.  The mothers in the novel worry that the family history and knowledge preserved in their hybrid language will be elided after their deaths.  At one point, June comes to understand how important it is for her aunties to preserve the meaning of "joy luck": "They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds 'joy luck' is not a word, it does not exist.  They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope from generation to generation" (pp. 40-41). (Heung par. 28)

In their communicating with each other, the daughters hear but do not listen to what their mothers are trying to teach them: lessons on survival, hope, and family.  The mothers want their daughters to understand them and in their stories of their lives before coming to America, they express themselves the only way they know how, in the hopes that the daughters will finally see them. 

All of the Chinese mothers had been victimized in their native land, and they overcame unbelievable obstacles to get to where they could raise their daughters without the same fear as their own mothers faced, and this is what they wish their daughters to see and to know: what it took to get to where they are now.

All the stories included in the first section of the book are about mother-narrators's experiences of victimization.  These old memories help shift the narrators, especially in an unfamiliar environment, to a growing belief that people are all victimized, in one way or another, by events beyond their control. (Xu 6-7) 

It is natural for a mother to want to protect her children from suffering the same sorrows as they themselves suffered.  That is why it is shown to be so important in The Joy Luck Club that the mothers share their life experiences with their daughters, to pass on their history to the next generation.  But even June recognized the gap that existed between herself and her mother: "We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more" (Tan 37).  June was not raised in China, did not face the same difficulties her mother did and so was unable to comprehend the depth of emotions that Suyuan felt.  "Having immigrated from a land where women were allowed almost no personal freedom, all the Joy Luck mothers share the belief along with Suyuan Woo that 'you could be anything you wanted to be in America' (132)" (Hamilton par. 2).  That was the purpose of the Chinese mothers immigrating to America, so that they could raise their daughters without fear, without oppression, and without being victimized further. 

Finally, there is the recurring theme of the search for identity within the stories of The Joy Luck Club.  The mothers in the novel are all Chinese born immigrants to America, seeking a new way of life, something better then what they had been used to back in China.  In America, they find a diversity of cultures which allows for women to be who they are, without the control of a man.  As Hamilton says, "A persistent thematic concern... is the quest for identity.  Tan represents the discovery process as arduous and fraught with peril.  Each of the eight main characters faces the task of defining herself in the midst of great personal loss or interpersonal conflict" (par. 1).  With the mothers, it is arranged marriages, separation from family, bad marriages, and death that are the conflicts within each of their lives which shape them early on in China.  They see their daughters suffering similar conflicts, such as bad marriages with daughters Lena and Rose.  However, it is Suyuan's death which catapults June into a world she is unfamiliar with: her mother's past; and facing the truth behind the "Chinese fairy tale[s]" (Tan 25) June thought her mother was telling her, which, in fact, turned out to be Suyuan's own story.  "The journey encompasses [June]'s attempts not only to understand her mother's tragic personal history but also to come to terms with her own familial and ethnic identity" (Hamilton par.1). 

Then, with the story between the Jong matrilineal relationship,

Waverly Jong feels immobilized by her mother's "sneak attack" (191), and at first completely misses the disenchanted heroic style that underlies the "sneakiness" of her mother's attack.  What she fails to see is that her mother's "sneakiness" is meant to prepare her for dealing with the unpredictable, in which she will constantly find herself faced with unstructured situations and the need to survive on her own. (Xu 10)

The desire of all the mothers in The Joy Luck Club is to prepare their daughters for when they will no longer be there with them, to protect them, to guide them.  Lindo is attempting to prepare Waverly for what she cannot see, to which Waverly feels as though her mother is attacking her instead of preparing her.  Waverly cannot see what her mother is doing, because she does not try to see from her mother's point of view.  As Wood states, "The daughters' quest to interpret both their mothers' and their own ethnic identity disrupts the daughters' ability to forge individual identities of strength in the way their mothers' did; that is, through the cultural stories of place they shared with their mothers" (84).  Because the daughters did not grow up in China, did not grow up in the Chinese way, it becomes more difficult for the daughters to really understand or sympathize with their mother's personal experiences and really take hold of all that their mothers are trying to teach them about finding their own identities.

In conclusion, Tan's The Joy Luck Club is a story that shows a matriarchal society built between mothers who were born in China, who later give birth to daughters in America, and their desire to pass down all that it means to be Chinese and female, which could only be learned in China, despite their daughters being more American than Chinese.  "The daughter may look like the mother, or even identify with her; and yet, the two are still worlds apart from each other" (Xu 7).  With the use of monologues, Tan's novel unfolds as the mothers tell their daughters their own stories of who they were in China and what happened to them, in the hopes of keeping their daughters from repeating the mistakes of the past while on their own search for personal identity.  The novel is framed with the story of Jing-mei "June" Woo and her mother, Suyuan Woo, who has passed away and is the catalyst for the rest of the "Joy Luck Aunties" desire to share their stories now, before they, too, pass on without their daughters knowing who they were or the importance of their cultural heritage. "These two frame stories, ending with a family reunion in China, suggest strongly a journey of maturity, ethnic awakening, and return-to-home, not just for Jing-mei Woo, but metaphorically for all the daughters in the book" (Xu 14).

 Works Cited

Hamilton, Patricia L. "Feng Shui, Astrology, And The Five Elements: Traditional Chinese Belief In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club." Melus 24.2 (1999): 125. Academic Search Premier. Web. 18 Apr. 2014.

Heung, Marina. "Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club." Feminist Studies 19.3 (1993): 597. Academic Search Premier. Web. 18 Apr. 2014.

Souris, Stephen. "`Only Two Kinds of Daughters': Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in The Joy Luck Club." Melus 19.2 (1994): 99. Academic Search Premier. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Amazon.com. Kindle. 20 Apr. 2014.

Wood, Michelle Gaffner. "Negotiating The Geography Of Mother-Daughter Relationships In Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club.’" Midwest Quarterly 54.1 (2012): 82-96. Academic Search Premier. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.

Xu, Ben. "Memory And The Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." Melus 19.1 (1994): 3. Academic Search Premier. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.