What does Jing-Mei's mother want her to become in "The Joy Luck Club" and why?

Suyuan, Jing-mei’s mother, wanted her to become a child prodigy like Shirley Temple and Lindo’s daughter. Suyuan urged her daughter to attempt practicing certain skills in order to establish and develop a special talent. Her daughter was initially receptive to the idea but eventually gave up on the quest to become a child prodigy like her mother wanted.

Suyuan enrolled Jing-mei for piano classes after she watched a young Chinese girl playing the piano on the Ed Sullivan Show. Suyuan settled for Mr. Chong as Jing-mei’s trainer. However, Mr. Chong was tone deaf and unable to hear the mistakes Jing-mei made while at practice. Jing-mei was not truly interested in learning to play the piano. She participated in a talent competition and failed miserably at her performance. Her mother was disappointed, but she did not give up on the piano lessons. 

What did Suyuan want her daughter Jing-Mei to be in The Joy Luck Club?

I believe that this question is asking about the section titled "Two Kinds." In broad terms, Suyuan would like Jing-mei to become at least one of three possible things. Suyuan would like her daughter to be rich, famous, and/or a prodigy.

You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.

"Of course, you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine.

In Suyuan's mind, those three things come hand in hand. A child prodigy is someone that can be marketed in order to become rich and famous. Suyuan really doesn't care what kind of prodigy Jing-mei might become. They all lead to the same end, and that is why Suyuan tries so many different ways to turn Jing-mei into a child star. The first attempt is to turn Jing-mei into a Shirley Temple of sorts. That doesn't work out, so Suyuan begins test after test in order to figure out what Jing-mei's hidden prodigy talent might be.

The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember.

Eventually, Jing-mei gets sick of all of the tests and the constant look of disappointment in her mother's face, so Jing-mei begins to intentionally subvert her mother's efforts.

In "Two Kinds," one of the chapters of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo becomes jealous of her friend Lindo Jong because Lindo's daughter, Waverly, is a chess champion who has received a lot of attention for her success. Suyuan reasons that if Waverly can be a prodigy, Jing-Mei can be one, too. After considering several different areas in which Jing-Mei could be a prodigy, Suyuan decides the piano is the most feasible. She agrees to clean a neighbor's apartment for free in exchange for piano lessons and two hours of piano access a day for Jing-Mei. Jing-Mei is initially excited to learn the piano, but quickly becomes disheartened when she does not immediately become good at it. This ultimately leads to a big clash between Suyuan and Jing-Mei in which Jing-Mei tells her mother that she wishes she was dead like her two older twin half-sisters, who Suyuan had to abandon when she fled China.

Why does Jing-Mei participate in the "Joy Luck Club"?

Jing-Mei had been asked by her father "to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luch Club", to replace her mother who had died two months earlier.  Jing-Mei's mother passed away suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm; she died "quickly", leaving "unfinished business...behind".  Jong-Mei's father believes that his wife "was killed by her own thoughts".

Jing-Mei's mother had started the "San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club" in 1949, the year she and her husband arrived in America as refugees from Kweilin.  She had originally fled to Kweilin to find safety from the Japanese who had invaded their land.  Kweilin turned out to be a squalid place, "a city of leftovers mixed together".  Its streets were teeming with refugees from all over China, and the crowdedness, stifling heat, and sound of bombing nearby made it a miserable place to live.

Jing-Mei's mother thought up the idea for the original Joy Luck club in Kweilin.  Her idea was to have a gathering of four hand-picked women, "one for each corner of (the) mah jong table".  Each week one of the women would host a party, and the women would play mah jong and share little delicacies they had managed to concoct from their meager stores.  In the face of despair they would "pretend each week had become the new year".  They would feast, laugh, play, tell stories, and "hope to be lucky".  The hope these women found at their weekly gatherings became their "only joy".

Why does Jing-mei join the Joy Luck Club after her mother's death?

I think that one of the reasons why Jing- Mei joins the club is to honor her mother's memory.  She recognizes that her mother felt a considerable amount of loyalty as being as a part of the club, as well as its founding member.  To continue that legacy after her mother's death is important to Jing- Mei.  In a setting where her identity is not completely and totally defined, her presence in the club  helps to establish part of this.  At the same time, I think that she continues to remain in the club because she understands that cultural identity in a setting like America is vitally important.  Jing- Mei recognizes that while it might not play a role in her initially joining the club, the loss of identity, the surrender of what was to what is, represents something that is a motivation for her.  Jing- Mei's presence in the club helps to bolster this and helps to set the stage for her own cultural reclamation that does reflect her identity by the end of the narrative.  The club is also a way to enhance the identity she possesses as a daughter.  The club becomes that link between mother and daughter that she was unable to fully forge while her mother was alive.  In life after death, Jing- Mei's presence in the club accomplishes what she could not do when her mother was alive in terms of embracing her mother's identity fully and all that it encompassed.

What is Jing-mei's best quality in The Joy Luck Club?

Jing-mei is a complex character, and there are several traits that could be singled as her best. Her empathy and connection to her mother are some of her best qualities, but these are in part due to her other traits, including her stubbornness, intelligence, independent spirit, and self-awareness. Her mother tells her that there are only two kinds of children: obedient ones and independent ones. Jing-mei's struggle is that she is independent but tries to be obedient. This is a bitter experience for her, and she acts out in various ways, such as purposely not practicing the piano and mortifying her mother at her first recital.

But it is also clear that Jing-mei understands that there is more to her mother's behavior than a simple desire to maintain discipline. The episode at the New Year's Eve dinner, when she and her mother take the worst crabs, is indicative of her mother's understanding of Jing-mei's character, and the moment when Jing-mei recognizes in her mother the same self-sacrifice and fierce independence she recognizes in herself. Like her mother, Jing-mei is after something more complex and authentic than embodying a single "best quality." In that sense, her best character trait can be considered her willingness to look further than most and to see people for who they really are.

What are Jing-mei's feelings towards herself in The Joy Luck Club?

Jing-mei, a lynchpin in the novel, is representative in many ways of all the daughters. She feels caught between the exacting demands and criticisms of her Chinese mother, Suyuan, and the desire to be her own person that is central to American culture.

Suyuan expects obedience and conformity, as well as high achievement from her daughter, which often leads Jing-mei to feel stifled. Jing-mei grows up without a strong sense of self and is not fully in touch with what she wants. At first, she mostly knows what she doesn't want. She doesn't want to be suffocated by Chinese culture and takes on the Americanized name June. She struggles to break free of her mother:

I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not.

Jing-mei also feels that she is a powerful person, but she doesn't know what to do with that power. She finally begins to find herself when she feels she can take up playing the piano again. It had been shoved down her throat when she was a child because her mother wanted her to be a prodigy, but now, she plays because she wants to. This freedom helps her reconcile her American self to her Chinese self.

Jing-mei also feels the fear all the younger women do that in pursuing an American identity, they are losing their Chinese heritage. Jing-mei is able to reconcile many of these conflicts when she visits China and meets her long-lost half sisters.

What keeps Jing-Mei grounded in The Joy Luck Club?

The first daughter we meet in Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club is Jing-Mei, daughter of Suyan. Jing-Mei is recovering from the recent, very sudden death of her mother. Her grief is compounded by the regret she feels at disappointing her mother, whose criticism made her feel that she never lived up to expectations by not finishing her college degree, not marrying, and drifting through life. At the opening of the novel, Jing-Mei seems forlorn and lost.

What saves her is the continuity of the Joy Luck Club. Her mother met three other Chinese women soon after coming to San Francisco, and they and their husbands formed a close friendship cemented by regular mah jong games. They are her “Aunties,” not by blood but by years of history.

“Auntie, Uncle,” I say repeatedly, nodding to each person there. I have always called these old family friends Auntie and Uncle.

They are the structure that keeps her grounded and her connection to her past. They are also a bridge to the future, as they ask her to take her mother’s place at the mah jong table going forward. Jing-Mei will ensure that tradition goes on.

How can we play with just three people? Like a table with three legs, no balance. When Auntie Ying’s husband died, she asked her brother to join. Your father asked you. So it’s decided.

Jing-Mei’s foundation also extends beyond the circle of her “Aunties” to her mother’s homeland. Although she once rejected her Chinese identity, claiming that she was completely American, her mother argued that a person’s heritage is powerful.

Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese. “Someday you will see,” said my mother. “It is in your blood, waiting to be let go.”

Jing-Mei truly connects with her Chinese roots as she travels to China to achieve her mother's dream of finding the twin daughters Suyan left behind there. She describes meeting them at the airport.

I look at their faces again and I see no trace of my mother in them. Yet they still look familiar. And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood ... The flash of the Polaroid goes off and my father hands me the snapshot ... And although we don’t speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.

She will assume the responsibility of telling the twins all about their mother—her life story, her dreams, how she never forgot them. Meeting her Chinese sisters fortifies Jing-Mei's bond with her mother and her Chinese heritage.