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The Joy Luck Club: Mother-Daughter Relationships

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The Joy Luck Club: Mother-Daughter Relationships
The theme of mother-daughter relationships is found throughout most of the chapters in The Joy Luck Club. It is the most predominant theme in the book. Some mother-daughter relationships, like the one found in the article by Psychology Today, represent how Rose Hsu Jordan was feeling when she married Ted despite her mother’s objections. Rose then needed her mother to help her to realize that because she chose not to make her own decisions, Rose would end up ruining the rest of her life. This situation is like the situation Holly Williamson was in when she fled from her home at nineteen to go off with her future husband to college, but Holly and her estranged mother reconciled after many years. “In America, I will have a daughter just like …show more content…
You can see their troubled relationship even from the beginning of the movie when Carmen calls Ana in to ask her to make breakfast and Ana refuses profoundly. Later in the movie, when Ana is told by Mr. Guzman that she got accepted into Colombia University the mom replies, “We are a family and we intend to stay that way!” A quote from The Joy Luck Club that relates the theme of mother-daughter relationships and the movie is, “ ‘This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.’ And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.” This quote also shows how the unnamed speaker cares for her daughter. It incorporates the idea that she came to America to make a better life for her daughter. Her swan was to symbolize this idea, but her prized possession was taken away at immigration and all she had to give to her daughter was a feather. This feather meant a lot to her as it represented her journey to America, so she wanted to give it to her daughter and tell her the story of her journey and express her true
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