The Joy Luck Club

  If you haven't seen the 1993 movie, "The Joy Luck Club," I highly recommend it.  I read the book by Amy Tan in my Asian American Literature course in my undergrad and we watched most of it in while in class. Scott and I checked it out from the library and watched it last night and I had forgotten how good it is.  It is a good mother-daughter movie, filled with stories of mothers trying to make a better life for their American-born daughters, and their daughters growing up with a double-consciousness of being a woman with Asian ancestors, growing up in America.  Watch it with a box of tissues though because I cried and I know Scott's eyes were moist (sorry babe). 

What I love about both the book and the film, is that it touches any mother-daughter relationship.  Guys sometimes just can't understand the aspects of this strange relationship because it is just not the same for fathers and sons or mothers and sons.  One moment mothers can be at each other, making each other cry; and the next minute, laughing and going shopping.  Or mothers can want so much for their daughters' lives to turn out differently than theirs that they push them back into that same situation, only on different terms.

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the movie (and the book):
"Even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way.  Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl, and I was born to my mother and I was born a girl, all of us like stairs, one step after another, going up, going down, but always the same way."