The Joy Luck Club

This section opens with a story that highlights the tensions between the mother/daughter pairs, as the mothers try to impart their knowledge while the daughters seek independence.

Waverly explains that her mother taught her to develop “invisible strength.” Instead of openly demanding what she wanted, Waverly learned to manipulate a situation to her advantage: “My mother imparted her daily truths so she could help my older brothers and me rise above our circumstances” (98). This directly ties into Lindo’s story of how she escaped her marriage using her wits. Similarly, Waverly finds that strategizing helps her beat her chess opponents: “It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell” (105). However, Waverly’s success ultimately causes friction with Lindo, who proudly paraded her daughter around the neighborhood. Waverly wanted her successes to be the result of her own innate talent, not a reflection of Lindo’s parenting. ”Why do you have to use me to show off?” she demands. “If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn to play chess?” (112). Waverly wishes to be the queen of her story, not a pawn.

When Waverly runs away, she committed the sin of separating from her family, and Lindo punishes her by telling the family to ostracize Waverly. “We not concerning this girl. This girl not have concerning for us,” Lindo says (113). To be shunned by one’s family negates one’s sense of self and Waverly feels her new isolation as she envisions her mother defeating her pieces on a chess board: “I was gathered up by the wind and pushed up toward the night sky until everything below me disappeared and I was alone” (114). The title “The Rules of the Game” alludes to both the rules of chess Waverly learned and the unspoken familial rules that she broke when she showed her mother defiance.

While Waverly learns the strength of invisible things, Lena grows up afraid of what she can’t see: the demons haunting Ying-ying. She says, “Because, even as a young child, I could sense the unspoken terrors that surrounded our house, the ones that chased my mother until she hid in a secret dark corner of her mind” (116). Lena exists as an unwilling bridge between her mother and the world around her, leading her to dread impending tragedies: “I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me I got from my mother” (117). Lena is mystified by her mother’s dire warnings: “I could understand the words perfectly, but not the meanings” (120). Ying-ying tells stories full of bad men and girls who have babies they don’t want. As a result, Lena constantly expects the worst to happen.

Lena’s father makes no effort to truly understand his wife or her aberrant behavior. When she arrived from China, he filled out her immigration papers with the name “Betty” and changed her year of birth. This erasure represents an attempt to set aside one’s past in order to pursue a new life, but it comes at the cost of ignoring the truth.

“The Voice from the Wall” refers to the family in the next apartment. Lena hears Teresa and her mother have violent screaming matches. She rationalizes that even if her family is troubled, at least they are better-off than Teresa’s. Yet a symbolic wall stands between Ying-ying and her family. Her cryptic allusions to her past (and Clifford’s act of erasure) walls herself off from her husband and daughter. This separation becomes more pronounced after Ying-ying blames herself for her baby’s death.

Lena thinks that Teresa and her mother are the “worst” family situation but when she sees that they truly love each other she realizes that there might be a way for her family to overcome her mother’s suffering: “I still saw bad things in my mind, but now I found ways to change them,” she says (133). Lena imagines helping her mother over their wall, so that they can understand each other.

Rose grows up in a family secure in their nengkan, the belief that they could do anything if they tried hard enough, but the trauma of losing Bing left Rose with emotional scars that impacted her personality.

The Hsus are devout Christian converts, thankful that their newfound religion had blessed them with a large successful family: “We were all blind with the newness of this experience: a Chinese family trying to act like a typical American family at the beach” (142). Rose’s guilt over having failed to watch Bing is compounded by her feeling that she should have anticipated the dangers. As she watched Bing play on the beach, Rose thought of The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, the book that warned of tragedies that could befall children.

Rose develops a fatalistic belief that nothing she did could change her life. When she meets Ted, a “white knight” who enjoyed “saving” her from difficult situations, she falls in love. Ted allows Rose to abdicate responsibility for everyday decisions, but this has the effect of diminishing her sense of self. “We used to discuss some of these matters,” she says, “but we both knew the question would boil down to my saying, ‘Ted, you decide’” (138). The title “Half and Half” refers to Rose’s belief that she had seen the signs that her marriage was troubled, but allowed its dissolution to happen, just as she had seen that Bing was in danger, but had allowed him to drown: “And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention” (153).

In other words, fate can be changed by paying attention. Having watched as An-Mei lost her faith in God, Rose now looks at her mother’s Bible, which she had thought symbolized An-Mei’s abandoned faith and realizes that it hadn’t been abandoned completely. An-Mei still believes that people have some control over their lives, in contrast to being at the mercy of one’s fate. Bing’s name was written in erasable pencil, showing that An-Mei never lost faith that he might someday return. An-Mei urges Rose to fight for her marriage, not to passively accept divorce.

Jing-Mei originally shares her mother’s optimism that anything was possible if one tried hard enough: “In all of my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect” (156). Suyuan was convinced that with enough effort, Jing-Mei could be a prodigy like Waverly. But Jing-Mei eventually becomes resentful, believing that her mother is blaming her for not being exceptionally talented: “I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I’m not” (159).

Jing-Mei took this battle of wills too far, to the point that she nearly deliberately plays the piano badly: “But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different that I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns” (165). Part of Jing-Mei still believes her mother, that she was exceptional, and she expected to suddenly play perfectly at the recital. This results in the egregious sin of publicly dishonoring her family. “I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly throughout the rest of the show” (168).

Suyuan refused to give up on the idea that Jing-Mei can still be a prodigy if she only works hard enough, but Jing-Mei balks at this continued charade and feels that her true self finally emerges in opposition to her mother. Suyuan found Jing-Mei’s defiance unacceptable: “‘Only two kinds of daughters,’ she shouted in Chinese. ‘Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!’” (170). Jing-Mei strikes back with the most hurtful comment possible, saying that she would rather be dead like her sisters than be obedient. After her mother dies, Jing-Mei realizes that her mother genuinely wished to encourage her, not to control her.

All of the daughter stories in this section focus on misunderstandings and conflict between Chinese mothers who wished to impart their wisdom and knowledge and American daughters who rejected those efforts. As they became older, the daughters came to see that these lessons had been in their best interest.