Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew Up… Chinese-American in California. Growing up in a highly competitive environment, Jing-Mei was pressured by her mother to become a prodigy. Initially as eager as her mother, Jing-Mei eventually learned to hate the pressures of being extraordinary and became "determined not to try, not to be anyone different."
Living… without her mother. Suyuan Woo's death comes as a surprise to all her friends, but especially her daughter, who still had many unasked questions for her mother.
Profession… copywriter. After starting "half a degree in biology, then half a degree in art, and then finishing neither," Jing-Mei dropped out of college and found herself a decently-paid, if modest, job in writing ads.
Interests… rebelling against expectations – and living up to them. For all her childhood rebellion, Jing-Mei hates disappointing others. Whether as daughter, Chinese-American, or friend, she wants to fit into the roles assigned for her. And when Jing-Mei can't, she feels her failures keenly.
Relationship Status… single. While all her Chinese childhood friends are married or engaged, Jing-Mei is unattached – and with her mother just dead, it's probably going to be a long time before she's ready to date.
Challenge… understanding her mother. In life, Jing-Mei and her mother had a rocky relationship, with Jing-Mei often vacillating between wanting her mother's approval and resenting Suyuan for her high expectations. Now that Suyuan's dead, Jing-Mei is still struggling to understand her mother and their fraught relationship.
Personality… headstrong, but unfocused and sensitive. As a child, Jing-Mei stubbornly avowed, "I won't be what I'm not," but now that she's an adult, she seems to have lost much of her childhood determination. Stuck in a middling job, she has few hopes for the future and fewer still for herself. Unconfident and sensitive to criticism, Jing-Mei is left even more aimless after her mother's death, forced to grapple with both her choices and her grief.
Get to Know her in...
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Through a series of flashbacks, four young chinese women born in America and their respective mothers born in feudal China, explore their past. This search will help them understand their difficult mother/daughter relationship.
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For readers of Amy Tan's bestselling novel, The Valley of Amazement, revisit her classic tale of mothers and daughters
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
