In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club,
Jing-Mei (June) has done all she can to reject everything Chinese. She sees herself only
as she is able: as an American, and this causes a great deal of strife between her and
her mother because her mother is only able to see life and her daughter from a
Chinese perspective. This may seem to be a "no-brainer," but where
Jing-Mei's mother sees a connection between herself and her daughter as a continuation
of the same person—a perception passed through generations of Chinese mothers and
daughters—Jing-Mei perceives her mother as trying to control and change
her.
Early in her life, Jing-Mei finds ways to empower
herself while forcing her mother to relinquish her "hold" on her daughter. Jing-Mei
tries to tell her mother that she is not Chinese. Her mother
explains that being Chinese goes as deep as her DNA. Jing-Mei resists her mother's
attempts to make her a child prodigy, finally hitting her mother's innermost heart by
screaming that she wishes she were dead like her half-sisters, left in China during the
war.
As Jing-Mei grows, she does not speak the language, so
as an adult, she can understand it only with difficulty, and she cannot really speak it
at all. When she and her father arrive in China, going to see her mother's twins who
have been found alive many years later—and sadly after her mother died—Jing-Mei asks her
father about the names of her sisters, her mother's name, and her own. Knowing what each
name means provides an insight into the person her mother was. While this makes Jin-Mei
sad—for the woman she never knew—it helps her to better understand the mother she has
lost.
The names are symbolic to the story: the twins' names
mean "Spring Rain" and Spring Flower," names of hope and beauty. Her mother's name means
"Forever Never Forgotten." However, as her mother wrote it, it
meant "Long Cherished Wish." In that she chooses to write it this
way, we can infer that this form of her name reflects who she became after losing her
twins. Jing-Mei's name means "pure essence" and "younger sister." Tan
writes:
I
think about this. My mother's long-cherished wish. Me, the younger sister who was
supposed to be the essence of the
others.
Jing-Mei believes
that her mother must have been incredibly disappointed in her, as she rejected
everything about her mother: her culture, her language and her wishes for her
daughter.
As she arrives in China, Jing-Mei
notes:
...I
realize I've never really known what it means to be
Chinese.
Seeing the landscape
with new eyes, she feels a kinship for this place, which she has actually
never seen before. And when she asks her father to tell her the
story of her mother's life and losing her twins, her father begins the story in English,
but she stops him:
"No, tell me in Chinese," I interrupt. "Really, I
can understand."
What she is
saying her is not that it's all right for him to speak in Chinese, which is his native
tongue. She is connecting with her culture. "I can understand" means literally that she
can comprehend, but I think it also means that she is beginning to know her mother
better—and what she meant about their Chinese
connection.
Jing-Mei rejects the Chinese language (and
other things) in America, but she is "awakened" to her heritage and her mother's
character in China, finally embracing that which she rejected for so many years. Only in
looking to the language, can she understand who her mother was, and therefore, who
she is.
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