Amy Tan's Revelation on Life Experiences
...n, that all chances of ever going to college – of having a decent life, of being respected – were gone.” (Interview, 6). After finishing high school in Switzerland, they moved back to California, where she met her future husband, Lou, who helped her to pull through. She followed him to San Jose City College, leaving the Baptist college her mother wanted her to attend. (Biography, 1). She also changed her major from neurosurgery, what her parents wanted for her, to linguistics and English. “Tan wen on to earn a master’s degree in linguistics and attended a doctoral program at the University of California.” (Saari, 931). Even though she changed some of her rebellious ways, Tan still disappointed her mother with this decision, which resulted in them not speaking to each other for six months. “She found out that she had three older half-sisters, her mother’s children from that first marriage, still living in China.” (Young, 1). A trip to China to meet her half-sisters, gave Tan “a new perspective on her often-difficult relationship with her mother, and inspired her to complete the book of stories she had promised her agent.” (Biography, 2). As a result, we now have The Joy Luck Club, which tells us the stories of four Chinese women and their first-generation American daughters. Each mother tells her own story about the life they had in China, and each daughter describes childhood experiences, as well as, the influence their mother had over them. Tan explains that if she hadn’t made that trip to China she would not have been able to write this novel. The Joy Luck Club is not only about Tan’s own relationship with her mother it is a narration that reveals the Chinese side of her. She found out that after her grandfather died, her grandmother was raped and had no alternative but to become this man’s concubine. As a result of the rape, she gave birth to a son which was taken from her and given to a high-ranking wife. This caused her grandmother to commit suicide, leaving Tan’s mother with relatives that later arranged her marriage abusive and adulterous husband. (Adams, 1). “Much of The Joy Luck Club is taken from Tan’s family history. Tan’s mother Daisy actually belongs to a ‘joy luck club,’ and when she left China in the 1940s she was forced to leave behind three daughters from a previous marriage.” (Saari, 932). In the novel, Tan narrates almost the exact same story through different characters. After reading Magpies, a short story in The Joy Luck Club, I concluded that the character of An-mei Hsu’s mother is actually Tan’s own grandmother. The story about their life, and what they went through are so much alike. An-mei’s mother, like Tan’s grandmother, was also forced into concubinage by the man who raped her and also committed suicide. The irony in this story is that Tan thought she was fictionalizing her grandmother’s life, because she was told that in real life her grandmother died of “noble and unfortunate causes” (Giles, 2). However, after her mother read this story she was surprised because Tan’s grandmother actually killed herself, just like the character in the story did. Tan says that it could just be coincidence, but there was no way for her to know some of the details in this particular story. Her mother says, “you don’t know these things, so my mother (Tan’s dead grandmother) must be telling you these things.” (Giles, 2). It’s interesting that even as she tries to change the facts a little, to make her work fictional, they still come out to be an actual part of her life, and true of her grandmother’s life in this specific example. I found that part of Waiting Between the Trees, which is told through the voice of Ying-Ying St. Clair, is somewhat relevant to an episode of Daisy Tan’s life. In this story Ying-Ying narrates what it was like being married to an abusive husband in China, Daisy Tan herself was married to a similar man. I also found a link between Daisy Tan and Jing Mei’s mother, both women were forced to leave their daughters behind in China. Two Kinds is also part of the collection of short stories found in The Joy Luck Club, and narrates an episode of conflict between the two main characters; Jing-mei and her mother Suyuan. Furthermore, it narrates a part of Amy Tan’s own life experiences and gives us a closer look at the relationship with her mother Daisy. The story begins with, “She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls.” (Tan, 584). We notice that this is almost the same about Tan’s mother, and acknowledge the fictionalized part about the twin baby girls. In the story Jing-mei is forced take piano lessons by her mother, so was Amy Tan, who’s parents expected her to become a concert pianist in her spare time. Jing-mei is a first generation Chinese-American girl, who lives with her mother and father in San Francisco, CA. Tan was also a first generation Chinese-American girl who was born in Oakland, CA. As an adult, she settled in San Francisco, which became the setting for her this story. The character of Jing-mei and Amy Tan have so much in common, that it leads me to believe that Jing-mei is her alter ego. Both girls had a low self-esteem, are rebellious when they were young, and later grow out of that stage, and become mature as they enter adulthood. “She studied jazz piano, hoping to channel the musical training forced on her by her parents in childhood into a more personal expression.” (Biography, 2). Her biography tells us that in the end, Tan played the piano on her own terms and in a way has learned to forgive her mother. As an adult she begins to comprehend her mother’s true intentions in being so pushy and realizes that she really didn’t mean any harm, all she wanted was for her daughter to become everything she never could. In Two Kinds, Jing-mei disappointed her mother at the talent show, when she messed up her recital. “It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations.” (Tan, 591). This was also true in Tan’s life, for she disappointed her mother several times, she didn’t go to the college her mother wanted her to go to, she majored in something completely different than what her mother was expecting for her to major in. When they were in Europe Tan describes her first boyfriend, at sixteen, as being “despicable in my mother’s eyes” and goes on saying, “anything tha...