The Joy Luck Club: 40-Mark Essay

Source A

The Joy Luck Club — “Two Kinds”

By Amy Tan

[1] My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.

[2] “Of course you can be prodigy, too,” my mother told me when I was nine. “You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky.”

[3] America was where all my mother’s hopes lay. 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. But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.

Notes

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Source B

The Joy Luck Club — “Two Kinds”

By Amy Tan

[63] I assumed my talent-show fiasco meant I never had to play the piano again. But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV.

[64] “Four clock,” she reminded me as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I wedged myself more tightly in front of the TV.

[65] “Turn off TV,” she called from the kitchen five minutes later.

[66] I didn’t budge. And then I decided. I didn’t have to do what my mother said anymore. I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China. I had listened to her before and look what happened. She was the stupid one.

[67] She came out from the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. “Four clock,” she said once again, louder.

[68] “I’m not going to play anymore,” I said nonchalantly. “Why should I? I’m not a genius.”

[69] She walked over and stood in front of the TV. I saw her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way.

[70] “No!” I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along.

[71] “No! I won’t!” I screamed.

[72] She yanked me by the arm, pulled me off the floor, snapped off the TV. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me toward the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up and onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased I was crying.

[73] “You want me to be someone that I’m not!” I sobbed. “I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!”

[74] “Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese. “Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!”

[75] “Then I wish I wasn’t your daughter. I wish you weren’t my mother,” I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, as if this awful side of me had surfaced, at last.

[76] “Too late change this,” said my mother shrilly.

[77] And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted to see it spill over. And that’s when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. “Then I wish I’d never been born!” I shouted. “I wish I were dead! Like them.”

[78] It was as if I had said the magic words. Alakazam!—and her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.

Section break.

[79] 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. I didn’t get straight As. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college.

[80] For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.

[81] And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable.

[82] And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?

[83] For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped. The lid to the piano was closed, shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.

Notes

Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.

Source C

The Joy Luck Club — “Rice Husband”

By Amy Tan

[74] The way things are going this week, Harold’s already spent over a hundred dollars more, so I’ll owe him around fifty from my checking account.

[75] “What is this writing?” asks my mother in Chinese.

[76] “Oh, nothing really. Just things we share,” I say as casually as I can.

[77] And she looks at me and frowns but doesn’t say anything. She goes back to reading the list, this time more carefully, moving her finger down each item.

[78] And I feel embarrassed, knowing what she’s seeing. I’m relieved that she doesn’t see the other half of it, the discussions. Through countless talks, Harold and I reached an understanding about not including personal things like “mascara,” and “shaving lotion,” “hair spray” or “Bic shavers,” “tampons,” or “athlete’s foot powder.”

[79] When we got married at city hall, he insisted on paying the fee. I got my friend Robert to take photos. We held a party at our apartment and everybody brought champagne. And when we bought the house, we agreed that I should pay only a percentage of the mortgage based on what I earn and what he earns, and that I should own an equivalent percentage of community property; this is written in our prenuptial agreement. Since Harold pays more, he had the deciding vote on how the house should look. It is sleek, spare, and what he calls “fluid,” nothing to disrupt the line, meaning none of my cluttered look. As for vacations, the one we choose together is fifty-fifty. The others Harold pays for, with the understanding that it’s a birthday or Christmas present, or an anniversary gift.

[80] And we’ve had philosophical arguments over things that have gray borders, like my birth control pills, or dinners at home when we entertain people who are really his clients or my old friends from college, or food magazines that I subscribe to but he also reads only because he’s bored, not because he would have chosen them for himself.

[81] And we still argue about Mirugai, the cat—not our cat, or my cat, but the cat that was his gift to me for my birthday last year.

[82] “This, you do not share!” exclaims my mother in an astonished voice. And I am startled, thinking she had read my thoughts about Mirugai. But then I see she is pointing to “ice cream” on Harold’s list. My mother must remember the incident on the fire escape landing, where she found me, shivering and exhausted, sitting next to that container of regurgitated ice cream. I could never stand the stuff after that. And then I am startled once again to realize that Harold has never noticed that I don’t eat any of the ice cream he brings home every Friday evening.

[83] “Why you do this?”

[84] My mother has a wounded sound in her voice, as if I had put the list up to hurt her. I think how to explain this, recalling the words Harold and I have used with each other in the past: “So we can eliminate false dependencies . . . be equals . . . love without obligation . . .” But these are words she could never understand.

[85] So instead I tell my mother this: “I don’t really know. It’s something we started before we got married. And for some reason we never stopped.”

Notes

Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.

Source A

The Joy Luck Club — “The Voice from the Wall”

By Amy Tan

[66] When I visited my mother in the hospital, she seemed half asleep, tossing back and forth. And then her eyes popped open, staring at the ceiling.

[67] “My fault, my fault. I knew this before it happened,” she babbled. “I did nothing to prevent it.”

[68] “Betty darling, Betty darling,” said my father frantically. But my mother kept shouting these accusations to herself. She grabbed my hand and I realized her whole body was shaking. And then she looked at me, in a strange way, as if she were begging me for her life, as if I could pardon her. She was mumbling in Chinese.

[69] “Lena, what’s she saying?” cried my father. For once, he had no words to put in my mother’s mouth.

[70] And for once, I had no ready answer. It struck me that the worst possible thing had happened. That what she had been fearing had come true. They were no longer warnings. And so I listened.

[71] “When the baby was ready to be born,” she murmured, “I could already hear him screaming inside my womb. His little fingers, they were clinging to stay inside. But the nurses, the doctor, they said to push him out, make him come. And when his head popped out, the nurses cried, His eyes are wide open! He sees everything! Then his body slipped out and he lay on the table, steaming with life.

[72] “When I looked at him, I saw right away. His tiny legs, his small arms, his thin neck, and then a large head so terrible I could not stop looking at it. This baby’s eyes were open and his head—it was open too! I could see all the way back, to where his thoughts were supposed to be, and there was nothing there. No brain, the doctor shouted! His head is just an empty eggshell!

[73] “And then this baby, maybe he heard us, his large head seemed to fill with hot air and rise up from the table. The head turned to one side, then to the other. It looked right through me. I knew he could see everything inside me. How I had given no thought to killing my other son! How I had given no thought to having this baby!”

[74] I could not tell my father what she had said. He was so sad already with this empty crib in his mind. How could I tell him she was crazy?

[75] So this is what I translated for him: “She says we must all think very hard about having another baby. She says she hopes this baby is very happy on the other side. And she thinks we should leave now and go have dinner.”

[76] After the baby died, my mother fell apart, not all at once, but piece by piece, like plates falling off a shelf one by one. I never knew when it would happen, so I became nervous all the time, waiting.

[77] Sometimes she would start to make dinner, but would stop halfway, the water running full steam in the sink, her knife poised in the air over half-chopped vegetables, silent, tears flowing. And sometimes we’d be eating and we would have to stop and put our forks down because she had dropped her face into her hands and was saying, “Mei gwansyi”—It doesn’t matter. My father would just sit there, trying to figure out what it was that didn’t matter this much. And I would leave the table, knowing it would happen again, always a next time.

Notes

Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.

Source B

The Joy Luck Club — “Waiting Between the Trees”

By Amy Tan

[44] My husband started to take many business trips to the north. These trips began soon after we married, but they became longer after the baby was put in my womb. I remembered that the north wind had blown luck and my husband my way, so at night when he was away, I opened wide my bedroom windows, even on cold nights, to blow his spirit and heart back my way.

[45] What I did not know is that the north wind is the coldest. It penetrates the heart and takes the warmth away. The wind gathered such a force that it blew my husband past my bedroom and out the back door. I found out from my youngest aunt that he had left me to live with an opera singer.

[46] Later still, when I overcame my grief and came to have nothing in my heart but loathing despair, my youngest aunt told me of others. Dancers and American ladies. Prostitutes. A girl cousin younger even than I was. She left mysteriously for Hong Kong soon after my husband disappeared.

[47] So I will tell Lena of my shame. That I was rich and pretty. I was too good for any one man. That I became abandoned goods. I will tell her that at eighteen the prettiness drained from my cheeks. That I thought of throwing myself in the lake like the other ladies of shame. And I will tell her of the baby I killed because I came to hate this man so much.

[48] I took this baby from my womb before it could be born. This was not a bad thing to do in China back then, to kill a baby before it is born. But even then, I thought it was bad, because my body flowed with terrible revenge as the juices of this man’s firstborn son poured from me.

[49] When the nurses asked what they should do with the lifeless baby, I hurled a newspaper at them and said to wrap it like a fish and throw it in the lake. My daughter thinks I do not know what it means to not want a baby.

Notes

Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.

Source C

The Joy Luck Club — “Waiting Between the Trees”

By Amy Tan

[73] So I decided. I decided to let Saint marry me. So easy for me. I was the daughter of my father’s wife. I spoke in a trembly voice. I became pale, ill, and more thin. I let myself become a wounded animal. I let the hunter come to me and turn me into a tiger ghost. I willingly gave up my chi, the spirit that caused me so much pain.

[74] Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.

Section break.

[75] Saint took me to America, where I lived in houses smaller than the one in the country. I wore large American clothes. I did servant’s tasks. I learned the Western ways. I tried to speak with a thick tongue. I raised a daughter, watching her from another shore. I accepted her American ways.

[76] With all these things, I did not care. I had no spirit.

[77] Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was a man who rubbed my feet at night. He praised the food that I cooked. He cried honestly when I brought out the trinkets I had saved for the right day, the day he gave me my daughter, a tiger girl.

[78] How could I not love this man? But it was the love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No fullness.

[79] Now Saint is a ghost. He and I can now love equally. He knows the things I have been hiding all these years. Now I must tell my daughter everything. That she is the daughter of a ghost. She has no chi. This is my greatest shame. How can I leave this world without leaving her my spirit?

[80] So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. The pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter’s tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.

[81] I hear my daughter speaking to her husband downstairs. They say words that mean nothing. They sit in a room with no life in it.

[82] I know a thing before it happens. She will hear the vase and table crashing to the floor. She will come up the stairs and into my room. Her eyes will see nothing in the darkness, where I am waiting between the trees.

Notes

Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.