Communication in The Joy Luck Club Unfortunately, the characters revealed in The Joy Luck Club have personal stories so complicated by cultural and emotional misunderstandings that their lives are spent in failed attempts to cross the chasms created by these circumstances. Lindo Jong provides the reader with a summary of her difficulty in transmitting Chinese culture to her daughter: “I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How was I supposed to know that these two things don't mix? I taught her how American circumstances work. If you're born poor here, it's no lasting shame. . . You don't have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons do their dirty business on your head. . . In America no one says you have to maintain the circumstances that someone else gives you. . . . but I couldn't teach her the Chinese character. . . How to know your worth and perfect it, without ever flashing it around like a cheap ring. Because Chinese thinking is better” (Tan 289). Each of the Chinese mothers attempted to guide her daughters, but they were ill-equipped to translate their experiences living in China into the alien environment they found in America. It was their life, not their language, that they couldn't translate. Like her friend Lindo, An Mei Hsu was raised in the Chinese way, as she describes: "...taught me to desire nothing, to swallow the misery of others, to eat my own bitterness. And even if I taught my daughter the opposite, yet she came out the same way! Maybe it's because she was born to me and was born a girl and I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. We are all like the stairs, one step after the. other, going up and down, but they all go in the same direction" (Tan 289). As the story unfolds, both mothers and daughters are forced to face the "truths" to which their private stories had previously blinded them. However, as readers, we must ask ourselves “what is truth?” When a person lives their life according to what they believe to be true, doesn't their belief become the truth itself, while the conventional "truth" becomes a lie? When the characters begin to face their demons from the past, in order to resolve their personal conflicts (both internal and external), the reader begins to hope that theirs may be a solution..