The Joy Luck Club Family Quotes

"Lena cannot eat ice cream," says my mother.

"So it seems. She’s always on a diet."

"No, she never eat it. She doesn’t like."

"And now Harold smiles and looks at me puzzled, expecting me tot translate what my mother has said.

"It’s true," I say evenly. "I’ve hated ice cream almost all my life."

Harold looks at me, as if I too, were speaking Chinese and he could not understand. I guess I assumed you were just trying to lose weight…oh well."

"She become so thin now you cannot see her," says my mother. "She like a ghost, disappear."

That’s right! Christ, that’s great," exclaims Harold, laughing, relieved in thinking my mother is graciously trying to rescue him. (III.1.90)

And my mother loved to show me off, like one of the many trophies she polished. She used to discuss my games as if she had devised the strategies.

"I told my daughter, Use your horses to run over the enemy," she informed one shopkeeper. "She won very quickly this way. And of course, she had said this before the game – that a hundred other useless things that had nothing to do with my winning. (III.2.12)

And looking at the coat in the mirror, I couldn’t fend off the strength of her will anymore, her ability to make me see black where there was once white, white where there was once black. The coat looked shabby, an imitation of romance. (III.2.34)

I didn’t know what to do or say. In a matter of seconds it seemed, I had gone from being angered by her strength, to being amazed by her innocence, and then frightened by her vulnerability. And now I felt numb, strangely weak, as if someone had unplugged me and the current running through me had stopped. (III.2.123)

I saw what I had been fighting for: It was for me, a scared child, who had run away long ago to what I had imagined was a safer place. And hiding in this place, behind my invisible barriers, I knew what lay on the other side: Her side attacks. Her secret weapons. Her uncanny ability to find my weakest spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in. (III.2.164)

"A mother is best. A mother knows what is inside you," she said above the singing voices. "A psyche-atricks will only make you hulihudu, make you see heimongmong." (III.3.33)

I know this, because I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness.

And 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 are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way. (IV.1.4)

And I would stare at my mother. She did not look evil. I wanted to touch her face, the one that looked like mine.

It is true, she wore strange foreign clothes. But she did not speak back when my aunt cursed her. Her head bowed even lower when my uncle slapped her for calling him Brother. She cried from the heart when Popo died, even though Popo, her mother, had sent her away so many years before. (IV.1.9)

I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter’s tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. (IV.2.80)

"Don’t be so old-fashioned, Ma," she told me, finishing her coffee down the sink. "I’m my own person."

And I think, How can she be her own person? When did I give her up? (IV.3.12)

"But if he is not a citizen, you should immediately do number two. See here, you should have a baby. Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter in the United States. Neither will take care of you in your old age, isn’t that true?" And we both laughed. (IV.3.44)

"You don’t understand," I protested.

"What I don’t understand?" she said.

And then I whispered, "They’ll think I’m responsible, that she died because I didn’t appreciate her."

And Auntie Lindo looked satisfied and sad at the same time, as if this were true and I had finally realized it. (IV.4.29)

And although we don’t speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish. (IV.4.146)