Joy+Luck+Club-First+Draft

In what way is a daughter the “American Translation? of her mother? Choose a mother/daughter pair and discuss Ying-Ying & Lena

You look exactly like your mother. This is what most of the girls hear from their surrounding people when they go out to shop, watch movie or anywhere with their mothers. However, is it the only appearance that resembles daughters from their mothers? Or are there other factors that bonds daughters and mothers? //The Joy Luck Club// by Amy Tan contains four different short stories for each of four sections, total of four daughters, four mothers and eight narratives. All of the children are Americanized, they speak English better than Chinese, lived in America for entire lives, and most importantly they do not understand mothers. Despite the fact that Americanized daughters and Chinese mothers are different and has cultural barrier in between, they are somehow identical and reminds of each other. Ying-Ying St. Clair and Lena St. Clair do not understands each other but have similarity from outside to inside.

Lena is very Americanized, even her mother Ying-Ying agrees with that. “Annh! Why do you Americans have only these morbid thoughts in your mind?” (Tan 103.) “You’re scaring that poor little girl and her maid”(108.) Ying-Ying called Lena an “American” also seeing her daughter as not a Chinese but more of Westernize. Chinese mother and Americanized daughter are two different cultures but the blood flooding inside both of them shares same features that cannot be denied. This is Lena is a American translation of Ying-Ying.

Ying-Ying is married to English-Irish man named Clifford St. Clair. Lena, a daughter between them has mostly her father’s appearance from name to his nose. However, “And my eyes, my mother gave me my eyes, no eyelids, as if they were carved on…” (Tan 104.) Lena has Ying-Ying’s cheeks but most critically, the eyes. Instead of anywhere else like nose, why did it have to be eye? Eyes have a significant meaning that other body places doesn’t hold. It’s the only place where human cannot change either naturally or surgically. One can dye hair and change color, one can have surgery on different body parts to look different, but eyes are the only place that nothing can be done. Medically its yet impossible to change one’s pigment color of eyes. In addition it’s the first place people look when they look each other that strongly emphasis the resemblance of Lena with her mother Ying-Ying.

Not only the appearance but the personality that Ying-Ying holds also has passed down to Lena. Ying-Ying was once a girl and a wife who did not speak up and hid all of her feelings inside. She married her first husband because she just felt she had to without any resentment and eventually fell in love after marriage. However, the out come of that was He cheats on her and leaves. Even her second marriage, she does not speak anything about her feeling towards Clifford it was “the love of a ghost” (251.) This was the personality that Ying-Ying was “shame”(252) of and she finds out Lena holds a same personality when she visits Lena’s house living with Lena’s husband, Harold. Lena is not an exception in relationship with her husband and how she acts towards him. Lena and Harold have constantly divided every 50:50, from money they spend to everything else. What’s more than that, Lena had to pay for ice cream that she did not even eat because she never told Harold that she can’t eat it after sever vomiting when she was young. Harold thought Lena was just on “diet” (162.) Ying-Ying even agrees that Lena has her blood “she is the daughter of a ghost”(252). Lena is exact copy of her mother except that she is Americanized. Ying-Ying actually knows that they have similarity. Nonetheless, there is other factor that Ying-Ying does know they share and criticize Lena, but Ying-Ying also posses same personality.

If there was a factor that translates Ying-Ying that she knew, there is other that she doesn’t know they share but scold her daughter for that. “Annh! Why do you Americans have only these morbid thoughts in your mind?” (Tan 103.) However Ying-Ying was constantly feared about something meaning she was also looking at bad side of something. She even overreacted “mother dropped my hand and covered her body with her arms as if she were naked, unable to do anything else”(108.) There was something she feared about. On top of that Lena saw things that ordinary people couldn’t “I began to see terrible things” (103.) Things like “beetle wearing the face of a child” (103), and more. Lena does not know but her anxiety is causing her to think differently. “I wondered why my father never worried. Why did my mother and I see something more?”(109) Once again, Ying-Ying and Lena shares something, the fear they see together that no one else can see.

Event though Lena and Ying-Ying were born in different cultures, and call each other American and Chinese, they share same characteristics that can be seen and cannot be seen.

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