The Joy Luck Club 2

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of the novel itself--within apparent conflicts or ambiguities. Tan's use of Confucianism may reveal her hypothesis of how a women's version of that patriarchal ethico-moral-ritual tradition might be passed down from mother to daughter and carried to America. Just as in the Confucian ritual system, very little of the mother-tradition in the text is told explicitly from mother to daughter: ritual actions are supposed to be observed, absorbed, read, and understood in order to be transformed, preserved and handed down in turn.
I.
From a Taoist perspective, the fact that The Joy Luck Club is divided into four sections of four stories each, about four mothers and four daughters, carries symbolic weight. In Taoism (see Appendices I & II), there are not four directions, but five, the fifth being the dynamic center (Corless, 2/13/92). The dynamic center of the novel is contained within the four sets of four stories. For example, the four places at the Mah Jong table are thrown out of ...

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Club after her mother's death, only to find that the Aunts wish her to correct a greater imbalance: to meet her two sisters in China, and fulfill her filial obligation to tell her sisters about their mother. The entire novel pivots around the Aunt's tension ("Tell them!") about the transference of the mother-tradition (Tan, 31).
The second tale, "Scar," introduces what Tan may be producing as women's version of Confucian Analects: the Moral Tale. An-Mei Hsu absorbs these stories from Popo, the grandmother, who bewilders the girl with stories of little girls with melons in their stomachs or brains leaking out of their head (Tan, 34). These are Popo's attempts to instill concepts of shou, ...

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