Joy+Luck+Club+Rough+Draft+tiffanykim

Things are expected to change between generations. People say that old people tend to think foolishly honest: tactless, and too serious. However, as time flows and history passes, people start to think and act more freely than before. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is composed of the stories dealing with relationships between mothers and daughters of different mind settings they have in each other. Why does the author not talk about relationships between fathers and daughters, nor mothers and sons? Tan thoroughly interact the relationship between women’s lives in accomplishing their dreams. During the Chinese Civil War, many Chinese women had a propensity to go to the States with a hope to pursuit better lives than they had in motherland. However, many of them later realize to fully change the setting of the environment and their setting of minds is ambiguous and complicated. Therefore, they want their dreams to come true by their daughters. The mothers stay as Chinese, who are only living in the States. Then, the daughters become U.S. citizens and receive Western education and their state of minds. Then they become able to speak English and the mothers think their daughters can be anyone, or someone in the society. To Suyuan, the American Dream is for her to pursuit a chance to be happy, yet does not wishes to lose everything she had back in China. Therefore, she brings three silk dresses with her to remember the old days in China. At the same time, Suyuan tries her best to chase for her glee in the foreign country. As seen in the “Feathers of Thousand Li Away,” a duck to be a goose, and finally to become a swan, Suyuan desires to situate herself in a higher social position, but brings a feather of a goose not to forget the things that the woman is leaving behind. Suyuan said, “We all her our miseries. But…what was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths…? Or to choose our own happiness?” In fact, Suyuan finds the Joy Luck Club twice. While she was in the miserable circumstances, she revives the Joy Luck Club in order to leave the Chinese traits with her along with her three other Chinese friends who came from China to San Francisco, also. Secretly, Suyuan aggressively takes action to search for her lost twin daughters instead of thinking passively in the new place. However, Suyuan fails to do so and stay as she always was before. She wants her daughter Jin-mei to achieve her wishes. Jin-mei was born in the States and can do anything and can be anyone. Maybe Suyuan’s American Dream includes a social status that she could not achieve. Now how about Jin-Mei’s American Dream? Suyuan wants to be happy and does many things to be happy because she was very unhappy. On the contrary, Jin-Mei was not unhappy and she doesn’t have a feeling to be happy, nor she tries to be happy. To Jin-Mei, the American Dream is to live her life with her own wishes. She doesn’t feel like enhancing her social accomplishment. She is just an American girl, not conscious of the fact that her parents are immigrants and they want their offsprings to be socially in a high position in the states. Therefore, Suyuan’s American Dream has been fulfilled about half because Jin-Mei is not interested in social improvement while Jin-mei’s American Dream has been pretty well achieved because Jin-Mei lives her life with her will, not with her parent’s will. The American Dream changes between generations. I will say with the case of Suyuan and Jin-mei’s positions. To mother generations, the American Dream is to get a chance to be happy, to be free and to get socially improved in the States. To daughter generations, the American Dream is to live their lives with their own volition, with freedom. To mothers, the American Dream is so important that they are conscious of the dream almost all the time. Daughters do not feel the accomplishment of American Dream very often.