Mother-Daughter Communication in The Joy Luck Club by Amy TanAmong the many stories involving the many characters in "The Joy Luck Club", I believe that the central theme that ties them all together lies in the inability of mothers and their daughters to communicate effectively. The mothers all have stories of past struggles and difficult times, but don't believe their daughters truly appreciate this fact. The mothers in the story all wish their daughters would never have to go through the struggles they themselves had to go through, but they are disappointed when their daughters grow up and do not demonstrate the respect or strength of their mother. This is the ironic paradox of the story. Chinese mothers came to the United States to escape the difficult lives they had in China and start anew in the United States. They didn't want their children to grow up like them. The short story at the beginning of the book describes this feeling. "Then the woman and the swan crossed an ocean several thousand miles wide, craning their necks toward America. During her journey, she cooed to the swan: "In America I will have a daughter like me. But there, no one will say that her worth is measured by the sound of her husband's burps. There, no one will look down on her, because I will make her speak perfect American English. And there, she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know what I mean, because I will give her this swan - a creature that has become more than anyone expected. story, I believe it accurately describes all the feelings of mothers in middle of paper...... relationships in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan. Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. 207-27. Ghymn, Ester Mikyung. Images of Asian American women by Asian American women writers. Flight. 1. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Heung, Marina. “Daughter Text/Mother Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club.” Women's Studies (Fall 1993): 597-616. Huntley, ED Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood P, 1998. Ling, Amy. Between the worlds: women writers of Chinese origin. New York: Pergamon, 1990. Tan, Amy. The Joy Chance Club. Vintage contemporaries. New York: A division of Random House, Inc. 1993. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian-American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993