Joy Luck Club Identity

I have decided to do a review on The Joy Luck Club, rather than Lost in Translation as I feel that the movie has more substance and touches on things that are closer to home. The Joy Luck Club is actually based on a book by the same name, a bestselling novel written by Amy Chang. The "Joy Luck Club" actually refers to the four Chinese American immigrant families that got together to form a club to play Chinese mahjong and also to have a good meal. As such, the plot is stylised in a way similar to the game of mahjong, with four sets of mother and daughter stories, the book itself has sixteen chapters. The movie has many major themes, but i will touch on the four i feel that are the most important and relevant to intercultural communications.
In the movie, I find that the daughters have an internal crisis of identity, that they know they are not fully "American", and still have some "Chinese" in them. Even for the mothers, the same case can be made, they struggle with speaking English to their daughters, and they can no longer speak and converse with each other in Chinese because they are trying to fit into the American society where English is the dominant language. The daughters also struggle to live in freedom, an ideal that is close to American culture, but they still strive to please their mothers and live up to their standards and attain their approval, which is something close to Chinese
June is forced to play the piano by her mother Suyuan. June believed she was a prodigy because her mum had such high hopes for her, even though she was playing sloppily and getting away with it because her teacher Old Chang was practically deaf. The theme of the American Dream is seen in a way because Suyuan wants her daughter to be take the opportunity of playing the piano and be the best at it, living the dream that anything is possible. In this scene, you also see the Chinese tiger mother culture, where the parents have high hopes and expectations of their child, and drill them in specific talents and subjects, it is a kind of tough love, in the sense that the parents just want their child to be the best at everything, in order to succeed in life. Suyuan enrols June into a talent competition, mainly to show off her daughters capability to Lindo, who was always boasting about her daughter Waverly's skill at chess. During the competition, you can see the high context way the mothers communicate to each other, they would say things under the pretence of false humility, how they could not control the talents of their daughters, when what they meant was to say that their daughters were better than the other. When June could not play the piano well in front of the crowd, she humiliated herself, as well as her mother. This is the concept of "face" in Chinese culture, by failing to play well, she