Comparing the Theme of Abandonment in Amy Tans The Joy...

Theme of Abandonment in Kitchen Gods Wife and Joy Luck Club One of the themes included in both The Kitchen Gods Wife and The Joy Luck Club is that of abandonment. In The Kitchen Gods Wife, the character of Winnie Louie is abandoned by her mother when she was a young child. In The Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo has to abandon her twin daughters on the road as she is escaping war-torn China. In The Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo is forced to abandon her twin daughters at the side of the road in a desperate act to give them a chance to live. Throughout her life she is haunted by this memory: When the road grew quiet, she tore open the lining of her dress, and stuffed jewelry under the shirt of one baby and money under the†¦show more content†¦She would go down the road to find some food and would be back. And without looking back, she walked down the road, stumbling and crying, thinking only of this last hope, that her daughters would be found by a kindhearted person who would care for them. She would not allow herself to imagine anything else (Joy 325). Suyuan Woo eventually stumbles onto a shelter for refugees. She is delirious with madness and disease, but is slowly nursed back to health. When she returns to the address she left with the twins, she finds it destroyed by war and realizes the chances of finding her daughters are hopeless. Suyuan continues to live her life without knowing whether her daughters survived, where they are, or if she will ever be reunited with them. InThe Kitchen Gods Wife, six year old Winnie is abandoned by her mother under mysterious circumstances. She is then sent away from her fathers prosperous household in Shanghai to live with her fathers brother and his family. Winnie, even sixty years later, still recalls the painful memories of when her mother abandoned her: For many years, my mother was the source of funny and bad stories, terrible secrets and romantic tales....I felt so bad to hear them. And yet I could not stop myself from listening. I wanted to know how it could be that my mother left me, never telling me why...Now I no longer know which story is the truth....They are all the same, all true, all