How are Ying-ying and Lena reconciled with each other in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club?

In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, it is
not clear as to whether the two actually are reconciled, but in Ying-ying's last
chapter, she is planning to fix things for her
daughter—difficulties in her daughter's life that Ying-ying feels
responsible for.

Ying-ying always seemed to have a way to
tell the future. She was aware of this, and later, so was her daughter, Lena. In China
Ying-ying married a vulgar, unfaithful man—she knew they would marry, and she knew he
was bad for her. Eventually he ran away with an opera singer when Ying-ying was
pregnant, so she aborted the baby because she hated the father so much. Feeling
disgraced, Ying-ying moved away, changed her hair and clothes to give herself a more
modern look. Taking a job as a sales clerk, she eventually met Clifford St. Clair. She
let him woo her for four years until she learned of her first husband's death. Then they
married and St. Clair took her to America. Ying-ying lost herself in pain then—and she
became a "ghost:" a woman with no power.

Ying-ying gives
birth to Lena. When Lena is a child, Ying-ying frightens her with stories of evil men
lurking everywhere, ready to hurt her. (Ying-ying does this because of her own sense of
powerlessness.) And so Lena grows up expecting bad things to happen. She even believes
that by making a wish not to marry a nasty neighbor named Arnold, that
she is responsible for his death.

Lena
eventually grows up and marries Harold. Their relationship was first founded on being
co-workers, but after they marry and start Harold's company, they
are never equal. He is her boss but she doesn't get paid well; she is gifted and has
helped their company to grow, but receives no credit or reward; and, everything is
tallied on a paper attached to the refrigerator—who pays for the steaks, who buys the
ice cream.

Lena's mother sees the list and asks her
daughter why they do it. Lena is not sure, and her mother is troubled. Ying-ying
believes that when she married St. Clair, she
lost her spirit:

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I let myself become a wounded animal. I let the
anger come to me and turn me into a tiger ghost. I willingly gave up my
chi, the spirit that caused me so much
pain.

Ying-ying believes she
has passed on her passivity and fear to Lena, and that is why Lena has no power in her
marriage. When Ying-ying sees this, she first challenges her daughter. When Ying-ying
breaks a vase...

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"It doesn't matter," I say..."I knew it would
happen."

Her mother asks her:
"Then why you don't stop it?" (This is a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/double+entendre">double
entendre. She not only asks why Lena didn't stop the vase
from breaking, but is really asking why Lena lets things in her marriage continue, doing
nothing.)

Ying-ying believes that when
she lost her chi, she became an "unseen
spirit." But now her daughter needs her mother's chi and so
Ying-ying plans to take hold of it again, regardless of the pain—like holding broken
glass in her hands. Once she regains her power—her chi—she will
give it to Lena, so she can discover her own identity, and find
strength in her marriage:

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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.

In this
way, Ying-ying reconciles herself to her daughter, though Lena would not understand the
gesture.

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Throughout the stories presented
in The Joy Luck Club runs the common thread of
mother-daughter connectedness and its influence on a daughter's identity
formation.