SOURCE: “Mothers and Daughters,” in Images of Asian American Women by Asian American Women Writers, Peter Lang, 1995, pp. 11–36.

In the following comparative essay on Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Ghymn discusses the fable-like quality of The Joy Luck Club and studies how cultural expectations affect the mother-daughter relationships portrayed in the novel.

The images of Asian American mothers and daughters as drawn by Kingston and Tan are so similar that it seems they have created a new set of stereotypes. Strikingly different from the familiar Madame Butterflies and Suzy Wongs, the new images of dragons, tigers, swans, shadows, bones, and stairs are the newly created metaphors for Asian American mothers and daughters. As Tan remarks to Emory Davis, “It's the images that are so important to me. That's where the mystery of the writing and the beauty of the story is...