‘Joy Luck’ Mothers Not Honest, Real

Like the four daughters of “The Joy Luck Club,” I am an Asian-American woman who has inherited the unspoken reality of my mother and her ancestors. And I, like the character June in the movie, experienced the death of my mother just a few months ago.

After seeing the movie and reading the article by its author and screenwriter Amy Tan (“Joy, Luck and Hollywood,” Calendar, Sept. 5), I would like to say that, despite the often buried but profound mourning for my mother that this film evoked, I was moved to indignation rather than tears at this depiction of what Tan refers to as the “heart of mother-and-daughter relations.”

To begin with, I would hope that my viewpoint reflects what Tan refers to as the “specific cultural issues” that I continue to encounter as an Asian-American woman. For me, those issues cannot be separated from the emotions I felt while watching this film.

It seems to me that although Tan’s abiding premise was to make a movie that was “honest and true, a movie about real people who happened to be Chinese-American,” what I saw on the screen was people who only seemed real. This reality was borne out by the attention to detail in the “look” of this film and the casting of Asian-American actresses whose lives paralleled those of the characters they portrayed.

Just exactly how was the movie unreal? It began with the way all the older women explained (by way of an intrusive voice-over narration) the truth of their pasts--as if they were willing or even able to talk about their histories with real understanding (if even just to themselves). These were tales of extremely shameful and painful secrets, and it was amazing to me that these mothers seemed to recognize they were victims of their own feelings of unworthiness.

On the contrary, I have watched my mother and others of her generation, who I am sure suffered similar indignities, hold firmly to the belief of keeping the past, especially the shameful part, a deeply held secret--perhaps even from themselves. The few times I would ask my mother about a feeling from her past, it was always “I don’t know” or “Why are you asking me that?” If she couldn’t understand her past herself, how could I expect her to explain it to me or anyone else?

I am also surprised at how the movie neatly portrayed all four mothers demonstrably changing the courses of their daughters’ lives by finally and triumphantly offering words of reassurance and acknowledgment. Each mother was able to tell her daughter how “worthy” she was, undoing years of motherly indifference and even abuse, in a cathartic moment of mutual understanding. Even though the mother-daughter relationships had been at best ambiguous and at worst demeaning, these wounded mothers were finally able to say that their daughters should not treat themselves the way they had been treated.

Here were four tragic mother figures imbued with the glow of love for their daughters. Furthermore, their love was defined as heroic self-sacrifice, emanating from a faraway land, which made it even more hypnotic and mythological.

It seems that Tan chose to “mystify” (a term coined by psychiatrist R. D. Laing) these women and elevate them with “good intentions” in order to create what I consider to be a false bond between these mothers and daughters. These daughters bonded with their mothers and came to a deeper “understanding” about them without really exploring the difficulty of their own lives (which were not developed adequately in this compressed film with an overabundance of “intimate” life stories).

I don’t believe that we come to any real truth or understanding in this way. Wouldn’t it be nice if all of us could defend ourselves against the pain that may come into our lives by acknowledging its roots in the cultural tyranny that had been suffered by our mothers? And to reverse all of the transgressions of our mothers by recognizing them as being heroic victims?

And, finally, doesn’t it make us all feel better (in a politically correct way) to see Asian women, typically considered the underclass or minority, finally breaking free of their social and cultural bonds to be remembered as courageous survivors?

I, for one, would rather not be blinded by such facile sentimentality. Instead, I recognize that my mother’s invisible silence and internalized shame was my reality. I witnessed that she approached her death the way she lived her life--with quiet resignation. Heroic? Perhaps not. Still, I’d rather have her memory be real and honest--for the dignity of both our lives.

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