The Joy Luck Club - Analysis of the Film

The Joy Luck Club - Analysis of the Film

Introduction

The movie The Joy Luck Club is the film adaptation of the famous novel penned by Amy Tan. The story revolved around the lives of four Chinese women who left their home country and emigrated to the United States of America with their four daughters. There are sixteen stories in the film that are interrelated (Penguin Books, 2012). The film presents the culture that these women left behind and the problems they had to face while trying to settle in the new country. It also sheds light on the problems of the four daughters of these mothers and their relationship with their mothers.

Discussion

One of the most interesting themes that have been discussed in the novel is that of split identity. The relationship of Suyuan Woo with her daughter Jing-mei is an interesting one (Penguin Books, 2012). She is one of the daughter's in the movie to whom her mother remains a mystery. This is so because her mother dies at an early age and she is chosen to replace her in the club. The writer cites that the major reason why the mother and the daughter relationship struggles is the fact that they two had come in and grown up in different cultures. Jing-mei who is known as June now belongs to a culture that is rather low context while her mother belongs to the high context culture of China (TCM, 2012). Her mother expects her to understand everything that she tells her by intuition. However, it does not happen.

Another very important aspect that makes Suyuan a ghost for her American born daughter is that she had left two of her twin daughters while coming to the US. She feels a sense of guilt and a very strong longing for her lost daughters and lives in their memory. June finds her mother's absence discomforting. Hence, the daughter tries to give meaning to things by learning from what she gets outside her house (Schell, 1989). Their relationship is disturbed by culture but what binds it is the natural love and devotion. It is this love that makes June live up to the expectations of her dead mother and unites the family again.

The story of the mother An-Mei Hsu is no different. She is a woman born and raised in a disturbed childhood moving from ...