In the novel, The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, the characters Suyuan and Jing-Mei Woo have a mother-daughter relationship bothered by conflict, but ultimately constructed of love and commitment for one another. Because of major differences in the environments in which the two were raised and life experiences in which the two had, these two women have some opposing ideas and beliefs. This and the lack of communication between these two women are responsible for many of the problems they face in their relationship.
These conflicts are only resolved when June learns about her mother’s past. The way that the relationship develops, and the conflicts June and Suyuan face, reveal some of the themes that Amy Tan intends for the readers to learn. These themes concern topics such as finding our life’s importance, making choices, and understanding our families and backgrounds. Most of the conflicts that June and her mother face are based on misunderstandings and carelessness concerning each other’s feelings and beliefs.
June does not understand or even fully know her mother because she does not know about her mother’s life while she lived in China. She doesn’t understand the ain her mother went through and still feels from the memories of it. Suyuan lost her two daughters in China, and her entire family was killed in the war; she leaves this place behind her and places all of her hopes in America and her family there. Like any mother, Suyuan wants the very best for or her daughter June.
Even her name, Suyuan, meaning “long-cherished wish,” speaks of this hope for Jing-Mei, meaning “the pure, essential, best quality younger sister. ” Suyuan tells her daughter that she can be anything she wants to be, and that she has great talent. At first June is excited and dreams about what she will become: “In all my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect. My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk for anything. ” (p. 33) Suyuan pushes June to be successful in many different areas such as dance, academics, trivia, and piano. June’s mother tells her, “You can be best anything. ” After failing to excel at each task set before her, June begins to feel more and more resentment towards her mother. She sees her mother’s hopes as expectations, and hen she does not live up to these, she feels like a failure. When June performs a piano piece filled with mistakes at a talent show, she believes that her mother is completely ashamed of and disappointed in her.
When June looked through the crowd at her mother’s face, she was devastated. “… My mother’s expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything”(p. 140). What June didn’t realize, was that the real reason her mother was so upset was not because she had not lived up to her expectations; she was unhappy because June idn’t care about having the best for herself. June didn’t have as many high hopes or as much of a passion to be successful at everything her mother wanted her to be successful at.
She failed because she didn’t try as hard as her mother wanted her to; she didn’t care about being “the best”. This strong opposition that June has to Suyuan’s high hopes originate from the love she has for her daughter. It is not until much later in her life, after Suyuan’s death, that June realizes how much her mother loved her and how proud she was of her. After Suyuan’s death, when June learns more of the details about her other’s past, she can see the good intentions her mother had for her in the ways that she acted.
June realizes that her mother was proud of her even though she was not a child prodigy or a genius at everything. After Waverly humiliated June at the dinner table by stating that the work she had done for Waverly’s firm was not good enough, Suyuan attempted to display her pride in June by giving her the jade pendent she had always worn. This pendent symbolized Suyuan’s life’s importance. She wanted June to know that her life had value and that she just eeded to develop and use her talents in order to discover this.
After her mother’s death, June begins wearing this necklace every day. She thinks back to her job and decides, “I was very good at what I did, succeeding at something small like that”(p. 233). Because June does not make many of these discoveries until after her mother’s death, she fears that she did not appreciate her mother enough during her life: “Right after my mother died, I asked myself a lot of things, things that couldn’t be answered, to force myself to grieve more. It seemed as if I wanted to sustain my rief, to assure myself I had cared deeply enough.
But now I ask the questions mostly because I want to know the answers. ” (p. 278) Suyuan loved her daughter more than her own life, but June did not realize this until her questions were answered and she began to understand her mother’s intentions in life and where The stories of Suyuan and Jing-Mei Woo reveal some of Amy Tan’s main themes in the novel. One important theme is getting to know about our parents and the heritage that has been handed down to us. We need to understand our parents n order to understand our own lives and the people we will turn out to be.
June spends the first half of her life believing that she is a disappointment to her mother and has been unsuccessful in life. However, when she learns more about her mother’s past and discovers that her mother is proud of her good heart and concern for others, she realizes that she has accomplished something by doing small things to the best of her ability. She learns that one does not have to be wealthy or famous in order to be successful. One should not think badly of certain people because someone else is better at something.
Another important theme is the fact that we need to make our own choices in life and find our own life’s importance. When June was a child, her mother was constantly pushing her to try different things that June had no interest in. Because she did not care about any of these things, she didn’t try that hard to be successful at them. Because of this, she would never accomplish anything great in her mother’s eyes. We build our own importance in life by deeply caring about something that we choose and putting all of our effort into developing or accomplishing this.
The relationship between June and her mother, Suyuan, is far from flawless, but has the strong foundation of love that that has been built over the years. There are many misunderstandings between these two women that are unfortunately left unresolved until after June’s mother died. Amy Tan uses this relationship and all of its complications to teach the readers important themes about life. Ultimately, love between this mother and daughter prevails through all conflict, even beyond Suyuan’s death, when her long-cherished wish of uniting her daughters is fulfilled
