Understanding The Joy Luck Club's Mothers and DaughtersAmy Tan's novel, The Joy Luck Club explores a variety of mother-daughter relationships between characters and, for some level, relationships between friends, lovers and even enemies. Mother-daughter relationships are most likely the different aspects of Amy Tan's relationship with her mother, and perhaps some parts are entirely a figment of her imagination. Therefore, Amy Tan believes that branching cultures and traditions within a family can be burdensome and cause the family tree to collapse. From the beginning of the novel, we hear Suyuan Woo tell the story of "The Joy Luck Club", a group started by some Chinese women during World War II. June explains recalling memories of her mother: "'We celebrated, we laughed, we played, we lost and we won, we told the best stories... we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy,'" (12) . The mothers grew up during difficult times in China. They were raised to never forget an important perspective of their life, which was "to desire nothing, to swallow the misery of others, to eat [their] own bitterness" (241). For many years, the mother did not tell her daughters their stories until they were sure their irritable offspring would listen. At that point, it's almost too late for them to understand the legacy their mother left behind in China. It seems their family's legacy cannot capture their imagination after years, decades and centuries of bliss and pain. Through the eyes of the daughters, we can also see the continuation of the mothers' stories as they learned to cope in America. With this, Amy Tan touches on a dark and little-discussed issue, namely the divergence of Chinese culture across American children born to Chinese immigrant parents. Chinese-American daughters do their best to become "Americanized," at the same time, abandoning their heritage while their mothers watch in dismay. For example, after the piano talent show fiasco, a fight breaks out between June and Suyuan. June does not have the blind obedience "to desire nothing... to eat [her] own bitterness." She says to herself, "'I no longer had to do what my mother said. I was not her slave. This was not China'" (152). Unbeknownst to June, Suyuan hopes and wants only the best for her daughter. She explains, “'Only one kind of daughter can live in this house.