Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Andrew "bone crusher" Massey category.
Joy + Luck = This Post
This post is in response to Lauren. I am intrigued by your thoughts on the conflict of thought on destiny between the mothers and daughters. I was thinking that they might conflict because they don’t know the troubles their mothers have experienced. It seems that all of their ill-will is spun out of the break between their thoughts and their mothers’ beleifs regarding what should be customary. It seems that only Jing-Mei truly appreciates the relationship between mother and daughter, and she only began to appreciate it after her mother’s death. Waverly Jong fails to grasp the pride that here accomplishments bring her mother. And the Rose Hsu has no idea what her mother had to go through as a teenage bride in China, she spends three days passed out on sleeping pills when a marriage she had, which at least was a little based on love, fails. The daughters don’t seem to appreciate the things their mothers endured and, thusly, they can’t truly respect the opinions of their mothers.
Joy and Luck Revisited
Tan is the new superglue. She does a magnificent job connecting characters who at first seem to be completly unique. In her newly fused jumble of familial relationships everyone is connected through their misunderstanding of their mother. For example, Jing-Mei for a little while only thought that her mother wanted to brag about her daughter’s acheivments and thusly was unsatisfied with her daughter. However, when her mother gives Jing-Mei the better crab, which is even more significant because custom doesn’t allow for her to eat a crab which died before being cooked (thusly she doesn’t eat), Jing-Mei discovers that her mother actually does have love for her. She also originally thought that her mother could have murdered their neighbors’ cat, but she discovers that her mother wouldn’t do this only after her mother’s death, when the cat jumps onto her windowsill. This misunderstanding is also seen between the Jongs, Waverly and Lindo. Waverly thinks that her mother hates her fiancee, Rich, and tries in vain to find the right way to tell her mother that they will be married. She finally confronts her mother, who is surprised to discover that she appears to hate Rich and she, in fact, had known already that they would be married and had been working to find a proactive way to have them married. This also seen in the Hsu’s when Rose is facing a divorce and her mother, who is somewhat distant, pipes up and tell her to fight for her needs. Tan truly found a way to connect a variety of characters in this novel.
Joy and Luck in Club Form
I agree with what Lauren has written regarding the mother to daughter relationships evidenced in the book so far. Instead of roughly repeating what she has said in the previous post, I’ll take a somewhat different approach. Throughout the course of this book so far, we have seen several examples of how a mother to daughter relationship can be the crux of a happy life. In this book, in China, the mother to daughter relationship always seems to fill in an emply void in a character’s life. Jing-Mei Woo’s mother works for her whole life to contact her first daughters, finally reaching them, yet dying before she is able to do anything. Yet, when the daughters wirte back, they seem to have experienced a catharsis (there are tears on the paper). Also An-Mei Hsu, who is a member of the American Joy Luck Club, finds only an empty parental void until her mother returns to her Grandmother (Popo) on her death bed. This happened during her youth in China. However, whenever the mother-daughter relationship is taken to the states, the relationship is lacking. Waverly’s mother seems only to be proud of her accomplishments, not really herself as a person. And, Jing-Mei’s and her late mother never really connected, always having a sort of official, rather than familial relationship. This book, so far, seems to show evidence of vast differences between the relationships of mothers to daughters between America and China.
