Search for Identity in the Joy Luck Club"Imagine, a daughter who doesn't know her mother!" And then it comes to me. They're scared. In me they see their daughters just as ignorant, just as forgetful of all the truths and hopes they brought to America. They see daughters who get impatient when their mothers speak Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in broken English. (Tan 40-41) Amy Tan frames The Joy Luck Club with Jing-mei Woo's search for identity. When Jing-mei's mother's friends tell Jing-mei that her sisters have finally been found and insist that she tell her sisters about her mother's life, Jing-mei emotionally responds that she doesn't know her mother. However, the generosity of her mother's friends helps Jing-mei realize how much she wishes she had understood her mother, how desperately she wants to question her if only she could. It is in this moment that Jing-mei recognizes the need to understand her mother's life both to understand who her mother was and to understand herself. Jing-mei's position at the mah jong table already suggests a connection between Jing-mei and her mother that parallels Jing-mei's position in the rest of the novel, as wherever Suyuan is supposed to tell her story, it is instead told through Jing-mei's voice. While Suyuan is expected to reconcile with her lost daughters, Jing-mei will go in her place. This planned act of reconciliation in which Jing-mei will fulfill her mother's dream foreshadows the other mother-daughter stories in the novel where An-mei, Lindo, and Ying-ying are just as eager to reclaim their daughters as Suyuan, in order to help in their daughters' struggles... middle of paper... to be able to connect with her mother. In her attempt to bridge the cultural gap between her Chinese heritage and her American upbringing, she questions what it means to be Chinese. Suffering from a disadvantage compared to the other daughters in the story, as her mother is dead, Jing-mei struggles to remember the foods her mother cooked, the names of her relatives, and the stories her mother told. However, it is when Jing-mei finally hugs her sisters, and in the polaroid they observe how they all look like their mother, that Jing-mei realizes that her family is the part of her that is Chinese. Therefore, to understand that part of her identity, she must embrace the memory of her dead mother. With the sisters linked by their mother in family resemblance, the photograph symbolically reconciles the two generations, as well as the two cultures.