The Joy Luck Club: Lindo and Waverly: Will, Pride and Conflict
Lindo and Waverly share a talent for strategy. Explore why that inheritance produces rivalry as well as pride, and how their later recognition changes the conflict.
Four chapters, one developing contest
Lindo remembers her wedding and the night when the marriage candle was watched.
Source A
The Joy Luck Club — “The Red Candle”
By Amy Tan
[50] A high official conducted the ceremony and he talked too long about philosophers and models of virtue. Then I heard the matchmaker speak about our birthdates and harmony and fertility. I tipped my veiled head forward and I could see her hands unfolding a red silk scarf and holding up a red candle for everyone to see.
[51] The candle had two ends for lighting. One length had carved gold characters with Tyan-yu’s name, the other with mine. The matchmaker lighted both ends and announced, “The marriage has begun.” Tyan yanked the scarf off my face and smiled at his friends and family, never even looking at me. He reminded me of a young peacock I once saw that acted as if he had just claimed the entire courtyard by fanning his still-short tail.
[52] I saw the matchmaker place the lighted red candle in a gold holder and then hand it to a nervous-looking servant. This servant was supposed to watch the candle during the banquet and all night to make sure neither end went out. In the morning the matchmaker was supposed to show the result, a little piece of black ash, and then declare, “This candle burned continuously at both ends without going out. This is a marriage that can never be broken.”
[53] I still can remember. That candle was a marriage bond that was worth more than a Catholic promise not to divorce. It meant I couldn’t divorce and I couldn’t ever remarry, even if Tyan-yu died. That red candle was supposed to seal me forever with my husband and his family, no excuses afterward.
[54] And sure enough, the matchmaker made her declaration the next morning and showed she had done her job. But I know what really happened, because I stayed up all night crying about my marriage.
Section break.
[55] After the banquet, our small wedding party pushed us and half carried us up to the third floor to our small bedroom. People were shouting jokes and pulling boys from underneath the bed. The matchmaker helped small children pull red eggs that had been hidden between the blankets. The boys who were about Tyan-yu’s age made us sit on the bed side by side and everybody made us kiss so our faces would turn red with passion. Firecrackers exploded on the walkway outside our open window and someone said this was a good excuse for me to jump into my husband’s arms.
[56] After everyone left, we sat there side by side without words for many minutes, still listening to the laughing outside. When it grew quiet, Tyan-yu said, “This is my bed. You sleep on the sofa.” He threw a pillow and a thin blanket to me. I was so glad! I waited until he fell asleep and then I got up quietly and went outside, down the stairs and into the dark courtyard.
[57] Outside it smelled as if it would soon rain again. I was crying, walking in my bare feet and feeling the wet heat still inside the bricks. Across the courtyard I could see the matchmaker’s servant through a yellow-lit open window. She was sitting at a table, looking very sleepy as the red candle burned in its special gold holder. I sat down by a tree to watch my fate being decided for me.
[58] I must have fallen asleep because I remember being startled awake by the sound of loud cracking thunder. That’s when I saw the matchmaker’s servant running from the room, scared as a chicken about to lose its head. Oh, she was asleep too, I thought, and now she thinks it’s the Japanese. I laughed. The whole sky became light and then more thunder came, and she ran out of the courtyard and down the road, going so fast and hard I could see pebbles kicking up behind her. Where does she think she’s running to, I wondered, still laughing. And then I saw the red candle flickering just a little with the breeze.
[59] I was not thinking when my legs lifted me up and my feet ran me across the courtyard to the yellow-lit room. But I was hoping—I was praying to Buddha, the goddess of mercy, and the full moon—to make that candle go out. It fluttered a little and the flame bent down low, but still both ends burned strong. My throat filled with so much hope that it finally burst and blew out my husband’s end of the candle.
[60] I immediately shivered with fear. I thought a knife would appear and cut me down dead. Or the sky would open up and blow me away. But nothing happened, and when my senses came back, I walked back to my room with fast guilty steps.
[61] The next morning the matchmaker made her proud declaration in front of Tyan-yu, his parents, and myself. “My job is done,” she announced, pouring the remaining black ash onto the red cloth. I saw her servant’s shame-faced, mournful look.
Notes
Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.
These four chapters carry the Jong family’s changing relationship. They do not form one continuous narrative: each return to the Jongs changes what an earlier episode means.
| Chapter and viewpoint | Decisive moment | What the later arc makes visible |
|---|---|---|
| “The Red Candle” - Lindo | Bound by a childhood family arrangement, Lindo enters an unwanted marriage. She conceals her resistance, studies the Huang household's beliefs and finds an indirect way to be released. | Her outward obedience contains an independent will. Strategy begins as protection when open refusal carries serious costs. |
| “Rules of the Game” - Waverly | Waverly learns Lindo's idea of “invisible strength”, becomes a chess champion and then objects when Lindo displays her publicly during a market outing. | The daughter has inherited strategic self-control, but she now uses it to resist the mother who taught it. |
| “Four Directions” - Waverly | After a failed first marriage, adult Waverly plans to marry Rich. His uneasy family dinner and her fear of Lindo's reaction make the old contest active again. | Professional and personal choice have not removed maternal authority; Waverly anticipates judgement before she knows exactly what Lindo thinks. |
| “Double Face” - Lindo | At a beauty salon, mother and daughter examine resemblance and difference while Lindo reflects on migration and Waverly's American upbringing. | The opponent pattern gives way to partial recognition. Likeness becomes harder to deny, but difference and mistrust do not disappear. |
The arc therefore moves from resistance, through inheritance and rivalry, to anxious adult choice, and finally to qualified recognition. A plot-only account would say that Lindo escapes, Waverly plays chess, Waverly introduces Rich and the pair visit a salon. A literary argument asks what develops: Waverly's will is partly Lindo's legacy, so independence and connection cannot be cleanly separated.
Lindo describes the supposed ancestral signs she uses to obtain release from the Huang marriage.
Source A
The Joy Luck Club — “The Red Candle”
By Amy Tan
[87] “In my dream, I saw a man with a long beard and a mole on his cheek.”
[88] “Tyan-yu’s grandfather?” asked Huang Taitai. I nodded, remembering the painting I had observed on the wall.
[89] “He said there are three signs. First, he has drawn a black spot on Tyan-yu’s back, and this spot will grow and eat away Tyan-yu’s flesh just as it ate away our ancestor’s face before he died.”
[90] Huang Taitai quickly turned to Tyan-yu and pulled his shirt up. “Ai-ya!” she cried, because there it was, the same black mole, the size of a fingertip, just as I had always seen it these past five months of sleeping as sister and brother.
[91] “And then our ancestor touched my mouth,” and I patted my cheek as if it already hurt. “He said my teeth would start to fall out one by one, until I could no longer protest leaving this marriage.”
[92] Huang Taitai pried open my mouth and gasped upon seeing the open spot in the back of my mouth where a rotted tooth fell out four years ago.
[93] “And finally, I saw him plant a seed in a servant girl’s womb. He said this girl only pretends to come from a bad family. But she is really from imperial blood, and . . . ”
[94] I lay my head down on the pillow as if too tired to go on. Huang Taitai pushed my shoulder, “What does he say?”
[95] “He said the servant girl is Tyan-yu’s true spiritual wife. And the seed he has planted will grow into Tyan-yu’s child.”
[96] By mid-morning they had dragged the matchmaker’s servant over to our house and extracted her terrible confession.
[97] And after much searching they found the servant girl I liked so much, the one I had watched from my window every day. I had seen her eyes grow bigger and her teasing voice become smaller whenever the handsome delivery man arrived. And later, I had watched her stomach grow rounder and her face become longer with fear and worry.
[98] So you can imagine how happy she was when they forced her to tell the truth about her imperial ancestry. I heard later she was so struck with this miracle of marrying Tyan-yu she became a very religious person who ordered servants to sweep the ancestors’ graves not just once a year, but once a day.
Section break.
[99] There’s no more to the story. They didn’t blame me so much. Huang Taitai got her grandson. I got my clothes, a rail ticket to Peking, and enough money to go to America. The Huangs asked only that I never tell anybody of any importance about the story of my doomed marriage.
Notes
Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.
Strength passes between generations
Lindo's restraint in “The Red Candle” should not be mistaken for passivity. The marriage ritual presents the union as fixed, yet Lindo notices that its apparent certainty is vulnerable. She then works through signs the Huang family will recognise, protecting her inner decision until she can act effectively. Her strength lies in understanding the rules around her without accepting that those rules own her mind.
In “Rules of the Game”, Waverly receives a child-sized version of this principle. “Invisible strength” means that power does not have to announce itself: a person can wait, observe and anticipate. Waverly develops those habits through chess and becomes an exceptional player. Her achievement is her own, but Lindo's teaching has helped give it a shape.
The inheritance becomes conflict during the market outing. Lindo's public pride makes Waverly feel displayed rather than recognised. Waverly confronts her, runs away and later imagines mother and daughter as opposing forces on a chessboard. That imagined contest matters because Waverly has taken a strength associated with Lindo and turned it against Lindo.
The literary scholar Tara Fickle argues that games across the novel connect freedom with constraint. Applied carefully here, chess does not provide a code in which one woman is simply the winner. Its rules give Waverly freedom to excel, but the opponent pattern also limits how she reads her mother: disagreement starts to look like a move that must be countered.
The strongest cross-chapter pairing is therefore not merely “both women are clever”. Their strategies operate under different pressures:
- Lindo uses indirect resistance to escape a marriage arranged in childhood while limiting public damage to both families.
- Waverly uses anticipation first to master chess and then to defend control over her own achievement.
The difference in stakes must remain visible. What connects the women is a habit of strategic self-command, not an identical experience.
Lindo describes the supposed ancestral signs she uses to obtain release from the Huang marriage.
Source A
The Joy Luck Club — “The Red Candle”
By Amy Tan
[87] “In my dream, I saw a man with a long beard and a mole on his cheek.”
[88] “Tyan-yu’s grandfather?” asked Huang Taitai. I nodded, remembering the painting I had observed on the wall.
[89] “He said there are three signs. First, he has drawn a black spot on Tyan-yu’s back, and this spot will grow and eat away Tyan-yu’s flesh just as it ate away our ancestor’s face before he died.”
[90] Huang Taitai quickly turned to Tyan-yu and pulled his shirt up. “Ai-ya!” she cried, because there it was, the same black mole, the size of a fingertip, just as I had always seen it these past five months of sleeping as sister and brother.
[91] “And then our ancestor touched my mouth,” and I patted my cheek as if it already hurt. “He said my teeth would start to fall out one by one, until I could no longer protest leaving this marriage.”
[92] Huang Taitai pried open my mouth and gasped upon seeing the open spot in the back of my mouth where a rotted tooth fell out four years ago.
[93] “And finally, I saw him plant a seed in a servant girl’s womb. He said this girl only pretends to come from a bad family. But she is really from imperial blood, and . . . ”
[94] I lay my head down on the pillow as if too tired to go on. Huang Taitai pushed my shoulder, “What does he say?”
[95] “He said the servant girl is Tyan-yu’s true spiritual wife. And the seed he has planted will grow into Tyan-yu’s child.”
[96] By mid-morning they had dragged the matchmaker’s servant over to our house and extracted her terrible confession.
[97] And after much searching they found the servant girl I liked so much, the one I had watched from my window every day. I had seen her eyes grow bigger and her teasing voice become smaller whenever the handsome delivery man arrived. And later, I had watched her stomach grow rounder and her face become longer with fear and worry.
[98] So you can imagine how happy she was when they forced her to tell the truth about her imperial ancestry. I heard later she was so struck with this miracle of marrying Tyan-yu she became a very religious person who ordered servants to sweep the ancestors’ graves not just once a year, but once a day.
Section break.
[99] There’s no more to the story. They didn’t blame me so much. Huang Taitai got her grandson. I got my clothes, a rail ticket to Peking, and enough money to go to America. The Huangs asked only that I never tell anybody of any importance about the story of my doomed marriage.
Notes
Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.
Waverly recalls an early lesson from Lindo.
Source B
The Joy Luck Club — “Rules of the Game”
By Amy Tan
[1] I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect from others, and eventually, though neither of us knew it at the time, chess games.
[2] “Bite back your tongue,” scolded my mother when I cried loudly, yanking her hand toward the store that sold bags of salted plums. At home, she said, “Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind—poom!—North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.”
[3] The next week I bit back my tongue as we entered the store with the forbidden candies. When my mother finished her shopping, she quietly plucked a small bag of plums from the rack and put it on the counter with the rest of the items.
Notes
Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.
Waverly’s chess success has changed her home life; she accompanies Lindo to the market.
Source C
The Joy Luck Club — “Rules of the Game”
By Amy Tan
[58] My parents made many concessions to allow me to practice. One time I complained that the bedroom I shared was so noisy that I couldn’t think. Thereafter, my brothers slept in a bed in the living room facing the street. I said I couldn’t finish my rice; my head didn’t work right when my stomach was too full. I left the table with half-finished bowls and nobody complained. But there was one duty I couldn’t avoid. I had to accompany my mother on Saturday market days when I had no tournament to play. My mother would proudly walk with me, visiting many shops, buying very little. “This my daughter Wave-ly Jong,” she said to whoever looked her way.
[59] One day, after we left a shop I said under my breath, “I wish you wouldn’t do that, telling everybody I’m your daughter.” My mother stopped walking. Crowds of people with heavy bags pushed past us on the sidewalk, bumping into first one shoulder, then another.
[60] “Aiii-ya. So shame be with mother?” She grasped my hand even tighter as she glared at me.
[61] I looked down. “It’s not that, it’s just so obvious. It’s just so embarrassing.”
[62] “Embarrass you be my daughter?” Her voice was cracking with anger.
[63] “That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I said.”
[64] “What you say?”
[65] I knew it was a mistake to say anything more, but I heard my voice speaking. “Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn to play chess.”
[66] My mother’s eyes turned into dangerous black slits. She had no words for me, just sharp silence.
[67] I felt the wind rushing around my hot ears. I jerked my hand out of my mother’s tight grasp and spun around, knocking into an old woman. Her bag of groceries spilled to the ground.
[68] “Aii-ya! Stupid girl!” my mother and the woman cried. Oranges and tin cans careened down the sidewalk. As my mother stooped to help the old woman pick up the escaping food, I took off.
Notes
Paragraph numbers locate the passage within this chapter. “Section break” marks a break in the original.
Continue this lesson.
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