Throughout the novel – The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan – many cultural boundaries are created by the contrast in customs between the mother/daughter generations. These blockades prevent true communication between the generations and hinder the mother’s ability to pass on her culture. This incapacity creates dissatisfaction and frustration for both parties. Much of the conflict in her novel is created on account of these cultural boundaries and surrounding discord. There is however, a point at which these boundaries can be surpassed by supreme maternal connections.

Within each story of The Joy Luck Club there are great quantities of divergence created by these cultural restrictions. These discrepancies are regularly illuminated and are the basis of which the stories lie. In the story “Waiting Between the Trees,” Ying-Ying St. Clair expresses her concern, “How can I leave this world without leaving her my spirit?” (Tan, 252). Reaching old age, Ying-Ying’s ability to pass on her Chinese heritage had been perpetually hindered due to the distant American culture that her daughter now lives by.

Ying-Ying and the other mothers of her generation find themselves lacking the ability and confidence to pass on their traditions due to maternal obstruction much like the mother in the vignette Feathers From a Thousand Li Away. In her story, a mother is hesitant to give her daughter a feather that “comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.” She is worried that on account of her daughter’s American culture she will not appreciate the feather, neglecting to see its true value. Such tribulations habitually occur between the Chinese mother generation and the younger American daughters in these stories.

Such events have been produced due to conflicts of misinterpretation and ill communication relating to their cultures. Often times throughout the stories a mother is found expressing her concern to her daughter’s misconception of her different oriental traits and traditions.

“When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming, she would see a tiger lady” (Tan, 248).

Her example expresses Ying-Ying’s anxiety of her daughter’s lacking traits through her own Chinese traditions. Ying-Ying feels as though her daughter Lena is lacking true vision and cannot see passed the layer of blindness that American culture employs.

These differences of tradition also fabricate various issues of angst for the daughter generations. In the story Rice Husband Lena St. Clair expresses anxiety over her mother. “She has a Chinese saying for what she knows. Chunwang chichan… Which means, I suppose, one thing is always the result of another” (Tan, 149). Afraid of her mother seeing faults in her relationship, Lena is uncomfortable around her mother’s judgmental eyes.

“She sees only bad things that affect our family. And she knows what causes them. But now she laments that she never did anything to stop them… I remember this ability of my mother’s, because now she is visiting my husband and me in the house we just bought in Woodside. And I wonder what she will see” (Tan, 149).

Her mother’s strange ability haunts Lena, separating them evermore. The mere presence of her mother embarrasses her, “Knowing what she’s seeing” (Tan, 161). Lena’s American house and habits were under the close evaluation through her mother’s Asian eye.

The vignette preceding Rice Husband also explains an event when a mother’s Chinese views are imposed on her American daughter.

“’You cannot put mirrors at the foot of the bed. All your marriage happiness will bounce back and turn the opposite way.’ ‘Well, that’s the only place it fits, so that’s where it stays,’ said the daughter, irritated that her mother saw bad omens in everything. She had heard these warnings all her life” (Tan, 147).

Most conflict throughout her novel is created by these means. Many of the daughters do no live up to their mother’s Chinese heritage. They are usually evaluated by this heritage since it is simply all their mothers know, ignorant to anything else. In these ways cultural boundaries have created means by which the daughters are constantly evaluated and judged.

A major theme in the stories of the novel is also sacrifice, which plays into the cultural boundaries. Many stories are told of the grandmothers who scarified various aspects of their lives to ensure or better the lives of their children. An-Mei’s mother took her life to ensure pleasant lives for both her daughter and son. When considering sacrifice, we can see how the mother generations of these stories have sacrificed their lives in China in order to raise their daughters in America. In these ways, the innate cultural boundaries are simply obstacles that must be overcome by both the mother and daughter, for they are inherent consequences of such a transition of customs.

At one point in this novel, these boundaries are surpassed finally bridging the gap between these generations by means of supreme maternal connections. In the closing scenes of The Joy Luck Club, June-Mei and her two distant sisters are finally reunited with their mother as an intermediary. “And although we don’t speak, I know we all see it. Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish” (Tan, 288). Suyuan Woo, their mother, had perpetually wanted to pass on her Chinese traditions to June-Mei, but as in Feathers From a Thousand Li Away, she had been perpetuated. In the end however, long after her death, with the reuniting of her three daughters her wish has finally come true and her feather was passed on.

Because culture cannot change, in several ways, these cultural boundaries are obstacles that each mother and daughter must overcome in their pursuit for successful maternal connections. This novel depicts the mother’s inherent tabulations as immigrants and also the various hurdles they must conquer. Over time, an Immigrant will undergo a transformation, a change in relations or attitude that will slowly shrink these cultural boundaries. For the women of The Joy Luck Club, teaching and living with their daughters has slowly drawn them closer finally allowing them to pass on their cultural legacies.