Final+Draft+Won+Seok

// The Joy Luck Club // by Amy Tan illustrates specific and subtle connections between the mother characters and the daughter characters. These connections, which are highly significant when reading the //Joy Luck Club//, help the readers understand the main point of the novel: the correlation between the Chinese Americans and the traditional Chinese. To specify, the characteristics of Ying Ying (the mother) and Lena (the daughter) draw parallels through their nature and ability to predict the future and through their pessimistic outlook of the life. Thus, Lena is influenced to become the “American Translation” of her mom Ying Ying psychologically. Lena first does not realize that she also has the ability to see the future despite the fact that had all along. She only believes that her mother is the one with “mysterious ability to see things before they happen.” (161) Her mother predicts while looking at the steeply new apartment to move in San Francisco that the “new baby in [the]…womb would fall out dead, and it did.” (161) She also predicts that “when a plumbing and bathroom fixtures store [opens]…up across the street from [her] bank,” (161) her bank would go bankrupt. This eventually becomes true; “one month later, an officer of the bank [is]…arrested for embezzlement.” (161) To continue, Ying Ying even knew all about her husband’s death that it would happen: And just after my father died last year, she said she knew this would happen. Because a philodendron plant my father had given her had withered and died, despite the fact that she watered it faithfully. She said the plant had damaged its roots and no water could get to it. The autopsy report she later received showed my father had had ninety-percent blockage of the arteries before he died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-four. Tan, 162 As such predictions are achievable with Ying Ying, Lena is also able to predict the future; Lena is influenced by Ying Ying’s ability to perceive the future as she experiences a lot of familiar incidents herself. For example, when Ying Ying “is visiting [Lena’s]…husband and [Lena]…in the house,” (162) Lena knows about the “cylindrical black vase on top” (178) of the table that will sooner or later fall and break. Shortly after, the black vase is shattered and “broken in half” (180). Plus, Lena says that she “knew it would happen.” (181) Ying Ying and Lena’s pessimistic outlook of their lives is apparent in various text references. In the start of the chapter in “The Voice from the Wall,” Lena is told by her mother that her “great-grandfather [has]… sentenced a beggar to die in the worst possible way.” (104) Therefore, Lena has been influenced by her mother of thinking the WORST: I used to play out the beggar’s last moments over and over again in my head. In my mind, I saw the executioner strip off the man’s shirt and lead him into the open yard. “This traitor,” read the executioner, “is sentenced to die the death of a thousand cuts.” Tan, 104 Moreover, Lena is told of another horrifying story about a man who lives in the basement of the house and who “is so evil and hungry that…would have planted five babies in [her]…and then eat [her]…all in a six-course meal, tossing [her]…bones on the dirty floor.” (106) It is these kinds of stories told by Ying Ying that influence Lena of thinking about the worst. Additionally, Lena hears a slight noise from the neighborhood but she imagines a girl being killed by her “mother…starting to slice the [girl’s]…life away, first a braid, then her scalp, and eyebrow, a toe, a thumb, the point of her cheek, the slant of her nose, until there was nothing left, no sounds.” (114) Furthermore, “Rice Husband,” which is also narrated by Lena, includes another example of Lena’s pessimistically judging by her mother’s influence. When Lena hears from her father that Arnold, “a boy who lived in [her]…old neighborhood in Oakland, had died of complications from measles,” (167) she feels that this outcome is her fault in not eating and throwing away her packed “lunch” (166) which eventually would save up and become a pock for every grain of rice she does not finish on her “destined” (168) husband’s face, Arnold’s face. Had not for Lena’s mother’s negative way of interpreting and teaching her daughter, Lena would not be as negative in a way she looks at the world. Despite their differences in the cultural backgrounds, the mother and the daughter correspond in their intellectual mind. As we say like father, like son, we may say like mother, like daughter: Lean St. Clair is an American Translation of her mom Ying Ying St. Clair. __ Work Cited __ Amy Tan. __The Joy Luck Club__. New York: Ivy Books, 1989.