The Joy Luck Club Rhetorical Analysis

Bridging the Gaps In Amy Tan’s novel of conflicting cultures, The Joy Luck Club, the narrators contemplate their inability to relate from one culture to another. The novel is narrated by and follows the connected stories about conflicts between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. Jing-mei, one of the daughters, has taken her mother’s place in a weekly gathering her mother had organized called the Joy Luck Club, in which four women would gather to gamble together to help each other. Through use of many different perspectives and concise diction, Tan reveals her theme of building bridges between cultures and generations and the revelation that tragedy shapes us. In The Joy Luck Club, Tan’s deceptively simple yet dramatic …show more content…
In regards to her use of diction as part of her overall style, Tan uses broken English a mother is speaking, and English with fragments of Chinese for when the daughters are speaking. For instance, Mrs. Woo lectures her daughter saying, "You never rise. Lazy to get up" and "You just not trying." This level of English allows Tan to reveal the mother's prominent Chinese heritage. This also establishes her as someone from another country who has experience working endlessly to get to where she is now. The words of the daughters are English, punctuated by Chinese. Rose Hsu Jordan, one of the American raised daughters, complained that she had been "feeling hulihudu" and that her life was "heimongmong,". These phrases translate to feeling puzzled and her life was full of fog. Her speech is a reflection of both her prevalent American mentality and her Asian roots. She weaves in and out of the two languages in a desperate need to be both part of the present and connected to the past in order to find her identity. Through her meticulously selected words, Amy Tan is able to demonstrate the difference between mother and daughter, as well as the problems with which they contend. In the parts of the novel where one of the women mediates on an event in her life, Tan almost always uses metaphysical conceits to compare something tangible to emotional matters, adding to the complexity and the appearance of their intelligence. The sentence structure is also very elaborate in these cases as opposed to when they communicate with people. An example would be this sentence: "I also beg[in] to cry again, that this [is] our fate, to live like two turtles seeing the watery world together from the bottom of the little pond," (Tan 244) the complex structure of it gives the reader a sense of despair and pity, which adds to the distressing tone of the novel. In