Essay+Rough+Draft+-+Matt+Kim



Quest for the Happiness

There are more than two-hundred million immigrations taking places around the world today. Why are there myriads of migrants leaving their own country behind and looking for new place to live? It is simple. Everyone wants to have joy in his or her life and is having a quest to find it. In order to become happy, one needs to fulfill his or her dream, have enough money, and take right steps that would not bring any regrets. The idea of the ideal utopia is people’s their own “American Dream.” American Dream is people’s national ethos in America that people want and are living for. In the book, “The Joy Luck Club,” by Amy Tan, presents four pairs of a mother and a daughter that come to America and start their lives there. One of the pairs, Lindo and her daughter Waverly, shows their struggle to achieve their own American Dreams. The time that resulted two families to have different age and belief led Lindo and Waverly to have different American Dreams. Lindo wished for freedom from Chinese culture and joy and luck for her daughter; Waverly hoped for deliverance from her mother, and priceless relationship with her family and friends.

After suffering from Chinese culture of having no freedom to choose her path, Lindo decides to come to America. From that point, Lindo lives for her dream, American Dream. Since Lindo was promised to get married to a stranger at age of two, she had no freedom in her life. As she becomes free from her chosen husband, Tyan-yu, she says, “How nice it is to be that girl again..., and feel the lightness come back into my body” (Tan 63). Healed from her deep wound, she gains a dream of having freedom of choosing who to marry and how to live. This becomes the major portion of her American Dream.

Although Lindo achieves American Dream of having freedom in her life, she does not fulfill the other half she wished to. She could not make her daughter happy. The goal of Lindo of having freedom becomes an obstacle to becoming a great mother and letting her daughter, Waverly, to have a happy life. To help her daughter to have a happy life, Lindo believes that Waverly has to have power that comes from having fame. In order for her to achieve such thing, Lindo decides to make her daughter to become a prodigy, a chess prodigy. However, this leads her to brag for her own pride and ends up hurting Waverly. She says “why do you have to have to use me to show off?..., then why don’t you learn to play chess?” (101), which shows clearly that Lindo’s American Dream has worsened the relationship of the mother and the daughter.

Waverly, the second generation in America, has similar but different meaning of American Dream from that of her mother, Lindo. Resembling to her mother, Waverly wants to have freedom, her own isolated life that she would not have to worry about having her life interfered, especially, by her mother. At a very young age, just like how Lindo was, Waverly loses freedom of her choice of doing what she wants to. She was not forced to participate and become the best, but she gets pressure from her mother and the people around her. As it continues, she hopes of freeing herself from her mother; she describes this pressure as a chess battle, seeing her as an enemy, “her black men advanced across the plane, slowly marching to each successive level as a single unit” (103). As Lindo does something that Waverly sees it pessimistic, she views it as a chess move that is trying to put her into her “edge” and win her.

Ironically, her first dream changes to the second one, having stable and sterling relationship with other people, including her mother. In the latter chapter of the book, “Four Direction,” she becomes a whole different person from her young age. She suffers to tell her mother that she will marry soon. She could not deliver her message to Lindo clearly. However, later, she achieves her dream of having valuable relationship with people around her by having a staunch conversation with Lindo, and finding out that her has “waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in” (204). With this, Waverly’s American Dream was fulfilled to have joyous and regret-less life.

The mother and the daughter attain their American Dreams of having freedom and learning the value of their family by the end of the book. Although the pair has faced harsh hardships and obstacles to come to the point to understand each other, the pair succeeds in obtaining their value and the dream they have; Lindo could fondle her goal, freedom and Waverly, that Lindo quested and wished for since in the China.