![]() He wants the divorce finalized so he can marry someone he was seeing while they were married-Rose's mother was right! Laughter overcomes her, and she invites Ted over to see her one last time. Then Ted calls and asks why Rose has not cashed the check or signed the divorce papers after two weeks. Her mother finally calls and wakes her up to tell her she is coming over. She is dreamless for the first time in her life. Rose becomes depressed and sleeps for the majority of four days. But this choice generally leads to trouble because American opinions are so complicated. Rose says she has always valued American opinions over Chinese ones. In other words, she does not feel strong enough by herself, so she depends on other people's opinions. Rose's mother tells her that she is confused because her personality lacks the element of wood. ![]() Despite advice from her friends and her psychiatrist, no one can seem to help Rose sort out her feelings. Rose could not bear to cash it or sign the papers. The check was for ten thousand dollars, and Ted sent it along with the divorce papers. She tells her mother that Ted sent her a check, and her mother intuits that he was cheating on her, but Rose laughs this off. Rose and her mother attend the funeral of China Mary, a beloved member of the First Chinese Baptist Church. Chou, a Chinese version of the Sandman, believes what her mother says. Rose recalls that she has always believed everything her mother says. In.Chapter 11: Rose Hsu Jordan-Without Wood But the very fact of their survival is in large measure attributable to their belief that people can affect their own destinies. Personal misfortune and the effects of war have tested the women's allegiance to traditional ideas, at times challenging them to violate convention in order to survive. The mothers inherited from their families a centuries-old spiritual framework, which, combined with rigid social constraints regarding class and gender, made the world into an ordered place for them. The daughters' inability to understand the cultural referents behind their mothers' words is nowhere more apparent than when the mothers are trying to inculcate traditional Chinese values and beliefs in their children. What is needed for any accurate translation of meanings is not only receptiveness and language proficiency but also the ability to supply implied or missing context. Jing-mei, recalling that she talked to her mother Suyuan in English and that her mother answered back in Chinese, concludes that they "never really understood one another": "We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more" (37). Language takes on a metonymic relation to culture in Tan's portrayal of the gap between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club. ![]() The mothers draw on a broad experiential base for their knowledge of American patterns of thought and behavior, but the daughters have only fragmentary, second-hand knowledge of China derived from their mothers' oral histories and from proverbs, traditions, and folktales.(1) Incomplete cultural knowledge impedes understanding on both sides, but it particularly inhibits the daughters from appreciating the delicate negotiations their mothers have performed to sustain their identities across two cultures. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry in the mothers' and daughters' understanding of each other's native cultures. ![]() In all the stories, whether narrated by the Chinese-born mothers or their American-born daughters, assertions of self are shaped by the cultural context surrounding them. Clair's story "Waiting Between the Trees" chronicles how betrayal, loss, and displacement caused her to become a "ghost." Rose Hsu Jordan recounts her effort to regain a sense of self and assert it against her philandering husband in "Without Wood." Framing all the other stories are a pair of linked narratives by Jing-mei Woo that describe her trip to China at the behest of her Joy Luck Club "aunties." The journey encompasses Jing-mei's attempts not only to understand her mother's tragic personal history but also to come to terms with her own familial and ethnic identity. Lindo Jong recalls in "The Red Candle" that her early marriage into a family that did not want her shaped her character and caused her to vow never to forget who she was. Each of the eight main characters faces the task of defining herself in the midst of great personal loss or interpersonal conflict. Tan represents the discovery process as arduous and fraught with peril. A persistent thematic concern in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is the quest for identity.
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