Reflections

Character Depiction: An-mei Hsu

In “The Joy Luck Club”, it can be hard to imagine what characters look like based solely from text, but one character that I have a real visual sense of is An-mei Hsu. Because Hsu was born in the year of 1914 and the current year in the book is 1989, I decided to show Hsu’s age by giving her facial wrinkles and hair with a mix of grey and black. Also, since this book is set in the 80s, I gave Hsu a perm which was a very popular style of hair at the time. Furthermore, from the chapter called Scar, Hsu tells a story of how she received a scar on her neck from an accident in the kitchen when she was just nine years old. Due to this story, I thought it would be appropriate to put a scar on Hsu’s neck. Finally, there is a Chinese flag on Hsu’s shirt to signify her deep roots in China.

Sacrifice in "The Joy Luck Club"

The theme that I based my drawing off of is sacrifice. The imagery that I present shows my interpretation of An-mei Hsu’s mother, who quite literally sacrificed a piece of herself in an attempt to save her own mother, Popo. While Hsu’s mother is a horrible person for leaving her family behind to live with a rich man, she most definitely displays her love for Popo by caring for her on her deathbed. This also shows that she will go to extreme lengths to show her love for her mother when their love is threatened.

Sacrifice to me is the most meaningful theme in the novel because in a way, every elder in the Joy Luck Club has sacrificed or experienced someone else’s sacrifice that eventually changed their lives and put them in their current position. For Suyuan, a member that recently passed away, was forced to sacrifice her daughters’ well being in order to save her own life from a deadly case of dysentery. This ultimately led Suyuan to San Francisco. Another elder of the Joy Luck Club that has experienced sacrifice is Lindo Jong. After Jong’s family’s farm was hit with a flood, the 12 year old unwillingly moved into the house of her soon to be husband, Tyan-yu. Tyan-yu treated Jong with little to no respect and Jong had to sacrifice her culture’s common morals to leave the toxic relationship. Finally, on the night of the Moon Festival in 1918, Ying-Ying St. Clair discovered that this figure that she was told to trust, called the Moon Lady, was nothing more than a man dressed in a costume. Clair had to ultimately sacrifice a part of her innocence at the young age of four to realize that not everything in the world is really how it seems.

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