The Joy Luck Club and The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts :: The Woman Warrior

The Joy quite a little Club and The Woman Warrior Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Amy tans novel, The Joy Luck Club describes the lives of inaugural and second generation Chinese families, particularly mothers and daughters. Surprisingly The Joy Luck Club and, The Woman Warrior Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts are very similar. They some(prenominal) talk of mothers and daughters in these books and try to find themselves culturally. Among the barriers that must be bastinado are those of language, beliefs and customs. The novel The Joy luck club starts with a yarn that right away suggests the importance of family and language. It is the tale of a hopeful immature woman traveling from China to America to start a late life. She carries with her a swan, which she hopes to present to her American daughter someday. The language barrier is undetermined when the womans good wishes for her future child are define by the idea that this daughter willing never know the hardships e ndured by her mother because she will be born in America and will " verbalise precisely perfect American English" ( burn 18). Though, things do not turn out exactly as planned for the young woman. Her lovely swan is confiscated by customs officials, and her treasured daughter, now an adult, does indeed speak only English and cannot understand her mother at all. Without a putting surface language, the expected loving link between mother and daughter is broken. discourse becomes impossible. (Kim 37)This story sets the stage for conflict between the Chinese mothers and their American daughters. The getting even of the language barrier is a constant theme in two The Joy Luck Club and The Woman Warrior. The English language plays a major role in assimilating the new world. For Tan, there is a conflict between Chinese and English, in her real life and in her story. Tan herself stopped speaking Chinese at age five. Tans mother, Daisy, however, speaks "in a combination of E nglish and Mandarin" (Cliff notes 6). Tan was taunted in high school for her mothers heavy kidnap accent (Cliff notes 6). Because Daisy never became fluent in English, the language problem only escalated between the two women. (Cliff notes 6) Tan expresses this stress in her novel with the voice Jing-mei. Jing-mei admits that she has trouble understanding her mothers meaning. "See daughters who grow hot when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English" (Tan 40).