Introduction
First of all, to reply to the set questions it is necessary to define the plot and the essence of the plot briefly. Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” is itself a joyful study of the examples of luck and friendship, which multiplies the joy of that luck. A complexly blueprinted novel whose author thought she was writing a short-story compilation, it is also a mother-daughter saga by a writer whose own mother desired her to be someone else except a writer.
Here, the definition of American circumstances and Chinese characters may be recalled as some expressions that have become nominal. American circumstances are claimed to define the reality of life in America (the USA, if to be more particular), which may be described as “allover competency”. The four immigrant families from China moved to the USA, and attempt to achieve the American dream using their Chinese character, trying to preserve their friendship and relations within families. The value of the relations which are attempted to be preserved is that these relations are both with parents, and with children, as the four main characters are mothers and daughters.
Main body
Chinese character here is meant to describe the industriousness of Chinese immigrants, who aim to gain success only by the means of hard work.
Talking about Lindo Jong, it is necessary to emphasize, that she is a strong-willed woman. When she got married at the age of 16, Lindo started caring for her husband as a brother, but her pitiless mother-in-law expected Lindo to bear a grandson. She confined Lindo’s activities, eventually ordering her to remain on bed rest until she could conceive and bear a child. The fact is, her husband was a real child himself and did not express any sexual interest to Lindo. In order to resolve the happened situation, she managed to persuade her young husband’s family that he was essentially fated to marry another girl who was already pregnant with his “sacred child” (actuality, the girl was pregnant and dumped) and that her wedding to Huang Tyan Yu would only bring misfortune to the family. Unchained of her first marriage, Lindo decided to move to America. She married a Chinese-American man named Tin Jong and has three children: sons Winston and Vincent, and daughter Waverly. Lindo feels regret over losing some of her Chinese identity by living so long in the USA (she is treated like a tourist) and expresses concern that Waverly’s American education has caused a barrier between them.
Lindo fully achieves the goal which she sets for her life, as she has a child, she has friends, she succeeded in her life and can afford to gather with her friends to play mahjong. In spite of some assimilation and losing her Chinese identity, she stays sincere, industrious, and friendly as any well-brought-up person independently of race, nation, or ethnic group.
By telling her children that she wanted them to have the combination of American circumstances and Chinese character, Lindo just wants that her children were surrounded by difficulties of real life, but not life of the throughout harmony and idyll, in order for her children could overcome any challenges easily. But along with all that, she wants them to stay industrious, cheerful, friendly, and blithe like she was when moved to the USA and faced all the challenges and difficulties of immigrant life.
The painful events in Lindo’s pasts and their “Chinese Character” have a specific impact on her children’s present lives. The power and significance of storytelling is rather an essential theme in the novel.
The only thing, where Lindo could not succeed is the relations with her children. Her daughters react in different ways to their mother’s desire to have them uphold behavior and ideas in harmony with Chinese tradition and values. Sometimes they happen to be invisible to their mother while doing American things, and at other times they try to be invisible to white conventional society while acting in Chinese traditions. The low self-esteem engendered in individuals when having to hide natural behavior and thoughts from others can lead to invisibility. When an individual feels like they cannot be themselves around others, they often forge an identity to get along that is a mask on top of their real identity, keeping their real ideas and actions invisible.
Lindo tries to give her daughter a Chinese character because Waverly behaves absolutely not like a Chinese girl. She is an independent-minded and intelligent woman but is annoyed by her mother’s constant criticism. While Chinese girl needs to be shy, gentle and respect parents. Well into her mature life, she finds herself reserved by her unconscious horror of letting her mother alone. She and June were childhood contenders, and their mothers often compared their achievements. Waverly was a chess genius and attained some recognition for her ability at the game, but quit playing in order to get back at her mother after a quarrel. When Waverly later tried to take up chess again, she observed, that she had lost her talent. After an unsuccessful wedding with a man named Marvin, she supposed, that her mother poisoned that relationship, Waverly starts living with her Caucasian boyfriend, Rich, and her daughter from the marriage with Marvin Shoshana. Although she suggests her mother doesn’t endorse Rich, Waverly still plans on marrying him but later discovers that her mother did not condemn Rich and that she had been misunderstanding her mother from the very beginning.
If comparing these two lives and these two fates, it is necessary to mention, that Waverly and Lindo have approximately alike destinies: living apart from their parents’ family, unsuccessful first marriage, the strong-willed character which rules them both through the life. At the first side these two lives may seem different, as Lindo was born in China, and faced the cruel mother in law, husband, who was fully uninterested in her, move to the other country. Waverly was born in the United States of America, had been brought up like a free human, and was taught to act according to her own will and good reason. But the fact is that, she faced similar challenges in her life – not close relations with parents’ family, lack of success in marriage, in spite of the fact that she loved Marvin, but she felt, that she can not stay with him. Instead, she finds a man who loves her, and this is not mutual.
As for the issues of invisible strength, readers first meet this definition, when Waverly Jong explains that she was six years old when her mother taught her “the art of invisible strength” a strategy for winning disputes and gaining admiration from others in games. Waverly and her two brothers live on Waverly Place in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The children enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells of Chinatown, the sugariness of the pasty red beans, the spicy smell of the herbs doled out by old Li, and the sight of the blood-greasy fish that the butcher guts with one deft slice.
Waverly, however, is an adolescent; she has not realized that as her mother teaches her the “art of invisible strength,” Lindo Jong is equipping Waverly with the very tools she needs to win the battles of life that she will encounter when she grows up. The “art of invisible strength ” is self-control. Waverly likens it to the wind, invisible yet powerful beyond belief. The wind can whip up fierce storms and flatten entire communities, yet leave no trace of its presence. In its power and invisibility, it is the strongest of opponents. The “strongest wind cannot be seen,” Waverly’s chess opponent tells her. As the human will, it cannot be seen or traced.
Conclusion
In another sense, the “art of invisible strength ” represents female power. Women who have been denied conventional paths to power traditionally use their ability to persuade, shape, and even to control events. If a woman cannot sit in the boardroom, she can shape events from her home—even though a man holds the reins of power. This force is even recognized (and sometimes derided) in the cliche “The woman behind the man.”
The “art of invisible strength ” is also the power of foreigners, those considered ignorant because they cannot communicate fluently and effectively in the dominant language.
References
Tan, Amy The Joy Luck Club, Ballantine Books publisher 1990
Bloom, Harold, ed. Amy Tan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001.
The Chu, Patricia P. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Ganahl, Jane. “Amy Tan Gets Her Voice Back.” Book. 2001: 40.
Huntley, E. D. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Souris, Stephen. “”Only Two Kinds of Daughters”: Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in ‘The Joy Luck Club.” MELUS 19.2 (1994): 99.
Women in Literature : Reading Through the Lens of Gender /. Ed. Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003.
Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.