Joy Luck

“Joy, Luck and Mom"

After shopping with Gayle, I headed to enjoy this perfect day. Walked to the mail box; stopped to visit Bev. Admired the radiance of the tulip tree. “It ain’t never been prettier than this year.” Ate supper of left-over burrito. Fiddled. Opened up the NetFlix envelope. Tonight’s feature, “The Joy Luck Club.” A blazing sychronicity after the Passover experience.

The subject of “The Joy Luck Club” is . . . what else? . . . mother-daughter relations.

Specifically, the mother-daughter bond. You’ve all read the novel by Amy Tan and undoubtedly seen the movie. To refresh your memories, the plot revolves around four women, born in China, who resettle in California, marry and raise families. Each has a daughter. The four form a club, the Joy Luck Club, which functions as a support group for the mothers, a sisterhood of four, that in turn supports a larger social, familial network of extended family and friends within the Chinese-American community. The core of the whole complex, the beating heart of the whole, is the bond between the four mothers and their daughters.

At first things do not go well for either mother or daughter. The bonds between are troubled, vexed. The narrative tells us why. Each of the four mothers has a story and each story has the same plot. Each has been separated from her mother; each flees China. Each brings to America weighty baggage bearing their guilt, fears, their feelings of ‘unworthiness,’ along their hopes and dreams for the future. This baggage of guilt and hope they thrust upon the slim backs of their daughters. They impress/press upon their daughters their hope of a better life--a major theme in the movie. It is not a choice. The daughter is obliged to be ‘obedient,’ to do what the mother asks, i.e. to fulfill hope, to live out the mother’s, and grandmothers’, unfulfilled dreams for their own lives. This, at the expense of the girl’s own hopes and dreams.

Mother comes first; daughter take the hind-side. This is all right and good, because, after all, mother knows best.

The movie portrays the effect of this ‘impressment of the mother’s hope’ upon the girls. Waverly is a genius at chess. She feels her power when she plays chess. She sees the whole board; she knows her opponent’s next move. No one can defeat her. Her mother intervenes and appropriates Waverly’s success, turning that toward her own need to feel worthy. As a result, Waverly loses her power; she stops playing chess. Another daughter, who is set up to be Waverly’s competitor, has the same experience, in this instance, with the piano. She goes to her recital in her best dress and plays like an angel until, mid-phrase, she looks into the audience and sees her mother. She stumbles, falters. She flays painfully through the piece and never plays again.

Guilt, self-doubt, a deep-seated sense of unworthiness along with impressed hope set mother upon mother, mother upon daughter, and daughter upon daughter. Relations are strained. Jealousy, competitiveness, disappointment inhibit/weaken/displace what should be the natural, nurturing bond between mothers and daughters, sisters and friends.

How do they escape?

As the mothers watch their daughters move into adulthood, they realize their mistake. This realization comes in part through reliving, retelling their stories of their childhood in China, their relations with their own mothers, and their experiences with men. The theme that emerges in all their stories is ‘unworthiness.’ As females within Chinese culture, they are always already unworthy. The plot turns as each mother realizes that the ‘feather,’ the symbol of hope that she carried from China and passed to her daughter is, in realty, unworthiness. By impressing her hope upon her daughter, each mother realizes that she had made her daughter feel unworthy of her own hopes and dreams.

Each daughter plays out this feeling of unworthiness in her adult relationships. Luckily (here comes luck), the mothers see their part in the wreckage. Working together, sharing stories, they change.

In one scene, the young piano player, now grown, confronts her mother. Or her mother confronts her. They argue. One thing leads to another. The issue of ‘unworthiness’ comes up. The daughter declares that she has always been a ‘disappointment’ to her mother: She is shy. She never married. She is not the musical prodigy her mother hoped she would be. She lacks ‘style.’

The mother, who will shortly die, and who abandoned twin baby girls in China, looks at her daughter, straight in the eye. “I see you,” she says. “I see you.” And what she sees, perhaps for the first time, is her daughter’s worth. In that moment of clarity, looking directly at the girl, the mother sees past her own hope and sees what the daughter is. She may not be a prodigy, she may not have style, but she has heart. A good heart. Like her famed crab dish, “best quality.”

This is the lynchpin that secures the complex of female relationships within the Joy Luck Club and extends outward to the larger community. The acknowledgement of worthiness sets things right within the mother-daughter bond. Or so Amy Tan would have us believe.