The Joy Luck Club: Mothers and the Motherland: Languages of Relation.
"The Joy Luck Club" is analyzed in this essay as a portrait of complex relations between families, cultures, and identities. In the setting of Chinese mothers and their bicultural Chinese-American daughters, stories are told by the characters reflexively, and as parables for their daughters to understand. Language is a key relation between the two, as are the cultural differences that different social structures produce. This essay considers the importance of language, and of social relations, in expressing the mother-daughter relations in this novel. An outline is included with this paper. 5 pgs. Bibliography lists 9 sources.
