Women’s Fate and Faith as Told in Amy Tan’s the Joy Luck Club

Culturally, women, regarded as weak, submissive and emotional social entities, are destined to be silent and inferior to men in a patriarchal society; however, this long-established position for women has caused them shame which today has turned into angst, leading them to question traditions, breaking their silence, revealing their painful yet rebellious experience by means of storytelling, as well as encouraging and hoping for their descendants through self-assertion have a better future. The female Chinese American writer, Amy Tan, with her first renowned novel telling stories of Chinese diaspora in America, The Joy Luck Club (1989), expresses the writer’s faith in women’s better opportunities when they are able to articulate their needs and strengthen their self-determination. This paper discusses women’s fate and faith as shown through different Chinese-immigrant mothers’ life stories that are revealed to their American-born daughters who face a dilemma in life. The mothers’ stories aim to empower their daughters and help them find solutions. Storytelling is an important means for the Chinese-immigrant mothers to communicate with their daughters, inuring the children to back to their ethnic roots, to better knowing about themselves thereby ensuring them their right to choose for their own happiness. To sum up, even if women are fated to be born at a disadvantage, they can have faith in themselves if they struggle hard enough for the chance and change. More or less, women’s fate and faith are likely to go hand in hand like two sides of the same coin, as do sorrow and joy in a person’s life.