Essay Example on The Joy Luck Club: Exploring Chinese & American Cultures

The Joy Luck Club is an Oliver Stone production and directed by a series of directors under the leadership of Wayne Wang. The creation of the movie is the replication of Amy Tan’s movie on the same title. The film is a domestic fiction revolving around the lives of four women born and spent part of their lives in China and eventually moved to America, where they strive to raise their daughters. The film explores the different cultures of both Chinese and American society. Both the four women, their daughters, and the community around affect their lives and bring out the bigger picture of intercultural communication. The aspect is evident through the lives of the daughters who live in the new culture and have to experience the Chinese cultures from their parent’s past as well as the current community. With this in mind, The Joy Luck Club offers an excellent opportunity for understanding intercultural communication through cultural interactions. Therefore, the paper offers a critical review and analysis of the movie with respect to cultural interactions.

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Cultural differences and cultural interactions are the primary themes of the movie. The theme manifest through the lives and struggles of the characters Lindo, Suyuan, Ying-Ying, and An-Mei (Heung, 2000). The four women hold on to their Chinese heritage and cultures despite having undergone a challenging life. Thus, the film’s director intends to demonstrate to the viewers the difficulties involved in dropping one’s cultures and embracing new and foreign ways of life. The Joy Luck Club seeks to establish common grounds and resonate with the mothers and their children. They live in alienation from their home, cultural practices, and heritage after moving to new communities. It targets viewers who, at one point in life, have experienced struggles with old cultural disintegration in their quest for cultural interactions. The cultural interactions in the lives of the four women both in China and when living in America significantly shaped their lives (Heung, 2000).

The four timeframes that the movie takes include the time when the mothers were young living in China, their youthful time when they moved to the United States, their daughters’ young age when they were living in America, and the daughters growing to be young adults. All these timelines are essential in the presentation of cultural interactions and intercultural communication. Both the women and the daughters undergo numerous cultural changes when they grow up. Through the characters, viewers can analyze the struggles that the four women undergo as they strive to instill Chinese cultures and heritage to the children born in America and live adhering to the American cultures. The struggle serves as the primary center of conflict in the film. Cultural communication clearly manifests through the lives of the girls. They see their mothers’ guidance and attempts to instill their traditions and cultures as failures in understanding the American cultures. In other words, Lindo, Suyuan, Ying-Ying, and An-Mei seem to be alienated from the American cultures and are still holding on to the Chinese cultures that apparently messed their pasts.

Identity realization is one of the essential areas in the movie. The mothers, just like their daughters, struggle to realize their identities. While the mothers work hard to ensure their daughters fit well within the Chinese cultures, they equally strive to assimilate their parents into American cultural practices. Intercultural communication manifests in the conflicting cultures between the mothers and their daughters. The acts of reconciliation of the Chinese past cultures and the current American traditions by the women is an aspect of intercultural communication from the film (Fred, 2012). Additionally, the daughters experience internal conflicts on whether to go by their independence and follow the American cultures or show loyalty to the mothers by embracing the Chinese cultures and heritage. Suyuan, in the story, is an embodiment of cultural interactions and intercultural communication. Upon establishing contact with the long-lost twins of a friend, he takes the initiative to inform them of how they got to America. She believes that it is her divine obligation to alert the girls on their migration past. Thus, she agrees to take a plane to China to talk to the twin sister. The cultural translations that she seek to create, however, face several challenges. These challenges relate to intercultural communication in many ways.

The Joy Luck Club entails different cultural aspects. The most common and notable cultures in the film include the depiction of the Chinese cultures. Mahjong, Fengshui, and astrology are the common symbolization of the Chinese culture in the film. Additionally, there is a vivid outline of the Five Element as well as the spiritual element presented in the movie. The generational conflict is the leading cause of the nostalgia that the daughters demonstrate in accepting traditional Chinese traditions and cultures having grown up in America. American cultures have significantly affected their lives. Therefore, the daughters feel they are more close to these cultures then Chinese traditions. That is why they seek to assimilate the mothers to American cultures through intercultural communication.

The four women tell tales that illustrate the brutality of traditional Chinese cultures. All of them had to undergo painful ordeals in their former relationship. The director presents the Chinese culture as that with gender discriminative qualities. For instance, Lindo gets married to a man who rarely shows love to her. Both the family and her mother-in-law constantly criticizes and humiliates her for lack of children. As a result, she tries to find her way out and migrates to America to try and get a better life. The interactional patterns between the people were not smooth as they would constantly experience challenges trying to fit in the new cultural environment. The women tell their stories to the daughters who only knew one side of the lives of their parents. The transitional pattern achieved through storytelling on the brutal pattern helps the women achieve the emotional healing of past wounds.

Numerous values are available in the film besides the challenging environment that Wayne Wang portrays. One of the clearest value is the underlying motherly love that the women show in the movie. The four women have firm love for their daughters. They decide to escape the tough traditions and cultures as they seek a better life for their daughters. The girls are the primary reason why women seek to liberate themselves from the oppressive traditional cultures. Thus, the complex relationship and love that they have are strong enough to topple the generational conflicts. Nonetheless, the strong bonds ensure that both the women and the daughter try to overcome the traditional conflict and establish common grounds that suits all. Both the women and the daughters find amicable ways to connect and feel less isolated. The women speak of their pain through the storytelling making it less tempestuous. They feel relieved and thus embrace the best sides of the Chinese cultures which they want to instill in the daughters.

Conclusion

Conclusively, The Joy Luck Club is the perfect presentation of intercultural communication. It presents the different parts of the Chinese and American cultures. The characters in the film strategically communicate the different aspects of the two cultural environments and the underlying struggles of obtaining a balance between the two. The women, despite the painful past, strive to instill the aspects of Chinese cultures on the daughters. However, the daughters, having grown in America, finds it hard to resonate with the Chinese cultures. Additionally, the film illuminates the importance of a motherly bond that enhances unity and cultural interactions between the different generations.

References

Fred, E. J. (2012). An introduction to intercultural communication.

Heung, M. (2000). Daughter-text/mother-text: matrilineage in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club. Amy Tan.