Joy Luck Club (Prove That The Daughters' Marriages Were Less Successful Than The Mothers)

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 12th grade October 2001

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Chinese and American thinking is like east and west, land and sky, which cannot go together. The way of living the lives is different. The American way of living is more independent, while Chinese people live according to their parent's wish, they feel proud of their family, and they have a lot of restrictions around them, which are mandatory to follow. But when the combination is kind of like this - American and Chinese, there are some complications, because it is not possible to adopt Chinese culture and thinking according to the American style at the same time. That's what happened with the families in the book "Joy Luck Club", which resulted into major conflicts, and because of that the marriages of the daughters were less successful than the mother's. Although the mothers had more than one marriages in their lives, but that was not a result of lack of communication, or love.

However this was the reason resulting more than one marriages in their daughter's cases.

One of the stories mentioned in the book "Joy Luck Club", which proves this fact is Lena's story, in which Lena was married to Harold. They marriage was a love marriage, not an arranged marriage. They thought that they love each other enough to marry each other, but after few years of marriage they realized that, what they thought was love, really was nothing more than a dream, which didn't lasted very long. They had conflicts developed among themselves that led them to a situation, where they didn't saw any other solution, except for divorce. They marriage fell apart, because they didn't had the understanding, which is essential among husbands and wives.

Waverly and Marvin's marriage is another example of this misfortune. As of the story mentioned, Marvin was...