| Amy Tan, categorized as one of the most prominent Asian American writers, has made a significant impact on the Asian American literary scene. She was born in 1952 in Oakland, California. With a release date of 1989, Tan's first novel The Joy Luck Club appeared on the New York Times best seller lists for nearly a year and won her several prestigious literary awards including the National Book Award for Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the Commonwealth Club Gold Award. The novel has been translated into seventeen languages, including Chinese, and has been adapted to the stage. Tan uses the four-player mahjong club to structure the four mother-daughter relationships. Their stories are interwoven in four major segments where each woman narrates how she has become what she is at a particular point in her life. This study proposes to examine the theme of identity in The Joy Luck Club. Its purpose is to demonstrate how the characters search for their identities. Chapter one is on silence breaking and female selfhood.Female subordination and female reticence are two remarkable features of Chinese traditional womanhood. Women are all bombarded with lessons of female obedience and silence from their own mothers or female caretakers in the progress of their growth. The concept of female subordination often leads to women's self-denial and the teaching of female reticence tends to enable women to accept their fate with resignation. The notion of punishment is also associated with female reticence and female obedience, which is seen in every lesson taught to the girls in the novel. Cultivated with such a repressive womanhood, they are inevitably compelled to take the role of listener rather than speaker, good at listening to admonishments and orders from others rather than their own hearts. Learning to swallow their sorrows and those of others, they are often caught in a state of inactivity, dependence, and depression. Such a cultural and social context is unfavorable to female self-development. Chinese immigrant mothers, such as Ying-ying and An-mei inevitably develop a negative womanhood that in turn affects their relationships with and the self-development of their American-born daughters. The lack of communication between the mothers and the daughters derives mainly from the mothers' silence, which in turn results in the daughter's emotional impoverishment and undermines her self-esteem and self-confidence. This makes their marriages tend to collapse at any moment. Seeing their own weakness, resignation, and reticence reflected in their daughters, Chinese mothers who used to be weak-willed come to understand the urgency of breaking their silence in order to save their daughters. They realize that only by breaking silence can they bridge the gap between themselves and their beloved ones. The act of breaking silence benefits both generations and sexes. By telling their ordeals and secrets in the past, Chinese mothers ultimately empower their beloved daughters and themselves, and help the daughters assert their female identity and out of the unhappiness of their marriages.Chapter two introduces the theory of memory by some philosophers and explores the relationship between the immigrant mothers' experience and their collected memory. How the narration of the past is related to a present sense of ethnic identity is also studied.For the Joy Luck mothers, they have experienced two kinds of extreme situations. One is famine, war, forced marriage and the other is cultural alienation and conflicts between the mothers and the daughters in America. In order to survive the drastic changes in their lives, these women need to maintain a psychological continuity and a continuity of self. Such a need requires the assuring structure of memory narrative: life-story narrative. Memory is for them a socializing, ego-forming expression of anxieties, hopes and survival instinct. All the mothers in The Joy Luck Club tend to interpret every kind of adversity or difference with this survival me...
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