Erika Kansas Harvey
Com 484
Final Discussion Prep
The Code of Respect in The Joy Luck Club A cultural code of communication is “a socially constructed and historically transmitted system of symbols, meanings, premises, and rules pertaining to communicative conduct” (Lecture #2, 10/1). We can find these codes in speech communities everywhere. A speech community is “a community sharing the rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety” (Lecture #3, 10/3). There are many different ways to interpret these codes depending on the speech community you belong to. For example, the Code of Dignity could be very different in one speech community or culture to the next. These codes are found in many places including our movies, books, and daily lives. In the book The Joy Luck Club there are several different codes of communication, one of which is the Code of Respect. The Joy Luck Club is a book that shows the connections between four friends and their daughters. The main characters in this book are predominantly Chinese, which is a culture that is known for its devotion to respectfulness. Respect is displayed in a variety of ways and to a variety of objects. They pay respect to their elders, their parents, their traditions, and their superstitions among many other things. When Lindo Jong is getting married to the husband that she was arranged to marry, she has to show an incredible amount of respect even when it is not easy (Tan p.40). She has to respect her soon to be mother in law, as she basically forces Lindo to be a servant. Then when the actual wedding ceremony is held, they all have to show respect for the tradition of Chinese marriages and the matchmaker that set Lindo and her husband up in the first place. The process of a traditional Chinese wedding is a ritual in their culture. A ritual is “a structured sequence of symbolic events, the correct performance of which pays explicit homage to a sacred object of a group of culture” (Lecture #14, 11/12). One of the first steps of this ritual is to invite all of the guests. In the Chinese culture nobody RSVP’d, instead it was just assumed that if you were invited you would attend. The guests of this wedding were extremely disrespectful of this ritual and the family because very few people showed up. Another step in the ritual that exemplifies a different kind of respect is the lighting of the red candle. For this step the matchmaker lights a red candle that has a wick on both ends and each end has either the bride or groom’s names written on it. At the end of the ceremony this candle is lit and if the flames make it through the night until the candle is gone, then there will be a successful marriage. In the middle of the night Lindo blows out the flame on her husband’s side of the candle because she does not want to be in the marriage. This act is incredibly disrespectful to her husband, her family, the matchmaker, and Chinese tradition. The servant that was supposed to be watching the candle all night was also very disrespectful when she left the candle unattended. This marriage was doomed from the start because many of the key roles in the ceremony did not care enough to communicate to the family that they did respect the marriage. The only reason she goes through with the whole marriage in the first place is because she respects her parents and her family name too much to disgrace them by going back on their promise. Since the ritual lacked the needed respect to carry out the correct performance of the sequence of events, the homage was not properly paid to their ancestors or their relationship. We can actually draw a lot more out of the ritual of the Chinese wedding. Such as the red candle itself, which is actually a symbol. A symbol is “a vehicle of conception that is a tangible embodiment of the idea” (Lecture #12, 11/5). The red candle represents many different things within this ceremony. First, the color red symbolizes power, strength, and love. These are all things that the couple would want to respect in order to have a successful marriage. Also, the flame symbolizes passion and endurance as it fights through the night to stay lit. The candle burning all the way down is a clear symbol that the wedding would be a successful one that would last forever. These symbols all play significant rules that demand respect in the ritual of the wedding. There are also many rules that the Chinese must follow in their ritual of a wedding. A rule is a “prescription or proscription for how to act under specified circumstance that has a degree of force in a particular social group” (Lecture #13, 11/7). A rule that was already mentioned was that guests who were invited to the wedding were supposed to show up to celebrate this occasion. Another rule is that nobody should interfere with the red candle while it is lit. This rule has a much stronger degree of force than the first because messing with the candle is absolutely prohibited. When people do not follow the rules that one would expect out of a certain type of occasion, they are showing a great deal of disrespect to the hosts. Another component of communication that we see often in The Joy Luck Club are premises. A premise is a “generalized statement of belief or value” (Lecture #13, 11/7). A common premise in The Joy Luck Club is that family is important. We can see this premise somehow in each story that is told in this book. One example that really shows how important family is is Suyuan Woo’s search for her twin daughters. This is a story that continues throughout the entire book, but finally comes to an end in the last chapter (Tan p. 304). The Woo family really shows how important family is by respecting what each other want and need. Before Suyuan died she was on a desperate search for her long lost twin daughters, and her daughter June decides to answer her dying request. She flies all the way to China with her father in order to meet her sisters. The twins’ adoptive mother also showed a great deal of respect for the Woo family by telling the twins where they really came from, and trying to help them track down their mother. While they are in China trying to locate the twins, June’s father tells her the full story of what actually happened when Suyuan abandoned the baby girls on the side of the road. A story is a cultural form in which one can learn what “meanings and motives are intelligible and persuasive in that society” by listening and interpreting it (Philipsen p. 85). Stories are an essential part of finding out what ideals a society lives by. June’s father explains how Suyuan carried the twins on foot for miles and miles. She carried them as far as she possibly could before she was so sick that she had no other choice but to leave them on the side of the road. As she left she made sure they had valuables and pictures to get them by until she could find them again. Each story has an action, a result, and agencies. The action in this story is Suyuan leaving her babies behind on the side of the road. The result is her searching for them for the rest of her life because they are the only surviving members of her original family. The agencies she used were the pictures that she left with the girls, as well as the letters she sent to everyone she knew in China in hopes of finding them. This story really shows how important family is to Suyuan because she had to make one of the hardest decisions of her life leaving the twins, and she never forgot about it or gave up on them. She respected her family and the Chinese people so much that she had absolute faith that one day the twins would be returned to her. Through her quest to fulfill her mother’s last wish, June also learns an entirely new respect for the Chinese culture itself. All of the daughters in this book struggle with finding the balance between being American and being Chinese. Their mothers want them so desperately to carry on and respect their Chinese culture, but they were raised in a big American city that had a lot of influence on them. Many of the other daughters found this respect for the Chinese culture by finally coming to terms with it and their relationship to their mothers, however it was too late for June to do that because Suyuan died. Once June got to China though she realized that she did not have to pick between the two in order to be happy. She finally realized that Chinese blood ran deep through her veins, and that this culture would forever be a part of she was. By finding this respect for her culture, she also found a new sense of respect for her mother. Respect can be communicated many different ways depending on the culture or speech community you are in. Some take silence as a sign of respect, while some take it as a sign of disrespect. Some think it is very important to respect your ancestors, while some others think it is more important to respect those that are with you in the present moment. Some believe that your family deserves more respect than anything else, while others believe that that level of respect should be kept for yourself. The Chinese are an extremely respective people and they have numerous ways of showing. When they communicate well with each other it leads to a better relationship, and therefore more respect. Respect is a key component in this culture’s way of communicating with one another.