Love, Loss and Forgiveness in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Abstract

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is filled with compelling stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. Tan presents how the healing power of forgiveness saves the troubled relationship between the Chinese mother and American daughter. Before this, however, the generational and intercultural differences generate the American daughter’s inability to value her mother’s Chinese story, one that carries love and hope. Thus, when the daughter Jing-mei fills her departed mother’s corner at the mah jong table, she finally can genuinely appreciate her mother’s devotion and actions by seeing things from her mother’s perspective, recalling, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird, which points out that one can never understand a person until one considers things from his point of view or climbs in his skin and walk around in it. As a result, walking in her mother’s shoes, Jing-mei learns to reconcile with her deceased mother and forgive her for painful misunderstandings by finding then unconditional love they shared between them. In all relationships, forgiveness brings understanding, and understanding brings compassion.