An Analysis of the Relationship Between Waverly Jong and Lindo Jong in Amy Tan’s Book

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tang is about relationship between mother and daughter living in San Francisco and in this essay I will focus on Waverly Jong and Lindo Jong. Lindo Jong as a mother wanted to teach her daughter Waverly Jong a lesson when she was young in a American way in Chinese principle but unfortunately she didn't understand what her mom is coming from and ignored her mom.

When Waverly Jong grew up, she finally knew what her mom is doing was right.

Amy Tang was interested in these kinds of relationships because of memory of the past when she was young and how she treated her mom. In these stories, Amy Tang showed us the relationship of their relationship by using different point of views of different sides, fables also symbols and metaphors.

Lindo and Waverly were brought up in different cultures. Lindo was a Chinese culture thinking woman, where Waverly was a mixture of both Chinese and Western culture.

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These cultural differences caused conflicts between Lindo and Waverly.

The main conflict that occurred between Waverly and Lindo was the ability of Waverly to play good at chess. Where Lindo was proud of her daughter and being boastful because of Waverly's ability to play chess comes up to the problem which left Waverly embarrassed and not happy.

"I wish you wouldn't do that, telling everybody I'm your daughter:", in this line we can see that how resentful Waverly was feeling, ended up Waverly gave up playing chess.

For another example, Lindo and Waverly had a greatly difficulty of communicating due to the lack of communication in the past. Also there were many conflicts in the progression of their relationship. This made Waverly feel difficult to say she wants to get married to her Lindo because she felt she was over controlled by her mother.

Also when they met at the Four Direction Restaurant, Lindo stared Waverly with disapproval and said. ` Ai-ya! What's the matter with your hair? `In this line we can see the cultural difference between Chinese and mix Western and Chinese, for Waverly she doesn't think hair style like blunt line fringe is a problem but in the same time Lindo does.

Since Lindo said "you must ask for your money back.", Lindo thinks if Waverly needs to have a haircut, it must be cut shorter and without hairstyle must be without fringe, that is Chinese style thinking. The reason why these incidents occurred is because the cultural difference of Chinese and mix Chinese Western.

Lindo was brought up to be a Chinese woman, she to follow her parent's plans to grow up a child and tried to be more like a mother. Lindo is a very strong Chinese woman, she thought up a lie to get rid of the marriage, it failed but she blew the candle trickily in the middle of the night to stop the marriage.

She is very narrow minded, promises, to Lindo she can sacrifice her life to keep her parents' promise and she was very sad because she married a person that she didn't love just because to keep her parent's promise. Lindo's stubborn and narrow mind conflicts with Waverly growing up in San Francisco

Amy Tan used different metaphors and symbols and also humour to help us understand through the fable. For example Amy Tan helped me learnt about point of views of children while facing arrange marriage and when mother growing up a child, also the point of views of being a child in different place with cultural differences with mother.