Cycles: The Joy Luck Club

In the book The Joy Luck Club there are many cycles that occur. One of the cycles that I will focus on is the cycle of tradition. In the book there is a lot of traditions, when the girls are young they are brought up in the Chinese tradition as they get older they stray away from the tradition but after they experience life away from tradition for a while they all stray back to the Chinese tradition they grew up in.

One tradition that we see in a lot of Asian families according to "Tiger Mom" and examples in this book is the strictness as well as persistence they display to keep their children on the right path. In the book the example is when Jing-Mei Woo's mother wanted her to be the best and wanted the best for her and become a prodigy.

"'Of course you can be prodigy, too.' My mother told me when I was nine. 'You can be anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky.'"

In this quote we see that she wanted her daughter to be the best. She felt that her daughter was better than her niece. And her daughter being better than her niece was the most important thing ever. Later in the story the mother has her daughter try all different kinds of talents until she is embarrassed by the daughter at her piano recital because all the pressure and false dreams presented by her mother wa too much so she gave up and did not try at her practices. this is one of the things that let her to stray away from  her tradition.

Another part of the book that shows that they always go back to the tradition of the Chinese and back to where everything began in at the end of the book. This one was also told my Jing-Mei Woo, she went back to China to find her mother's twin daughters. In the end she went back to where everyhting began. Her mother died and she fulfilled her mother's born mission to find her daughter.She lives with the tradition her mother shows her for most of her life but she does not know how different it will be for her when she actually gets to China.

"The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And i think, my mother was right. I am becoming Chinese."

She feels a change within herself as she enters China. She has never felt as if she was fully Chinese even though her mother is Chinese and she grew up in a very traditional Asian home. In this book there are a lot of examples of cycles that are showed. Some of them agree with the traditional asian culture while others seem random and only connect to the characters in this book. This is only one of many cycles in this book.