Notes

Hector Nunez
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Greve
Literary Response #1
Joy Luck Club Literary Response #1
“The Joy Luck Club” is a novel written by Amy Tan about the relationship between chinese mothers and their chinese-american daughters. The book is split into four parts, each with chapters corresponding to certain characters. The first section/part of the book is titled “Feathers From A Thousand Li Away”, which may be due to the prologue given for this. The prologue for this section is about a woman who had bought a swan which, the vendor claimed, was originally a duck who had stretched its neck to become a goose, but had resulted in being something greater; a swan. The idea of this swan is an example of symbolism that will help Identify the theme.
In the story, it is stated that the woman who bought the swan sailed across an ocean, thus the “Thousand Li Away”, part, Li likely being a unit of distance. The feather would be representative of hope and unknown surprises , just as the duck had hoped to become a goose, but was given the surprise of becoming a swan. In the prologue, it is say that the mother had hoped to give the swan’s feather to her daughter, to show that she has high hopes for her. Since the “Feathers” in “Feathers From A Thousand Li Away” is plural, I believe it is that all of the mothers have this same amount of hope for their daughters. In this section, we are given the backstory for each of the mothers