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"'What a mess,' I heard him mutter to himself, trying to shake his pant leg loose of a blackberry vine that had meandered onto the walkway. And I knew he was calculating how long it would take to get the place back into order.
'I like it this way,' I said, patting the tops of overgrown carrots, their orange heads pushing through the earth as if about to be born." (110, pdf)

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“He assigned plants to certain planter boxes. Tulips could not be mixed with perennials. A cutting of aloe vera that Lena gave me did not belong anywhere because we had no other succulents. I looked out the window and saw the calla lilies had fallen and turned brown, the daisies had been crushed down by their own weight, the lettuce gone to seed. Runner weeds were growing between the flagstone walkways that wound between the planter boxes. The whole thing had grown wild from months of neglect.” (108, pdf)

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"Why are you doing this?" I asked her, afraid she would give me a true answer.
But she whispered some Chinese nonsense instead: "When something goes against your
nature, you are not in balance. This house was built too steep, and a bad wind from
the top blows all your strength back down the hill. So you can never get ahead. You
are always rolling backward." (57, pdf)

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Ying-Ying tried to describe why she was moving the furniture to Lena, saying that she and the house were not in balance. The short story "American Translation" is about a mother fixing the balance in her daughter's house, just like when Ying-Ying tried to ask Lena why she and Harold kept lists of what they'd recently bought. She could feel that the house was off-balance, and she would know because of her own experience of being unbalanced.

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Ted separated his love for Rose, the tulips, from an eternity together, the perennials, which is also important because perennials are also known to lack wood, just like Rose. Her chapter in the third section is even called "Without Wood", which is both a reference to her mother's assessment that she lacks self-confidence and therefore bends to the will of others and the meaning in relation to flowers. In fact, roses are perennials so in this interpretation Ted has removed his love from something associated with living the rest of his life in tandem with Rose’s.

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Rose reviews the dilapidated garden in the wake of her marriage with Ted. He used to tend it with so much care and precision, meticulously organizing and maintaining the planter boxes. When their marriage started to falter, he stopped caring for the garden and it rotted and grew over when it was just Rose living there. The garden represents Rose’s marriage to Ted. In the beginning it was deceivingly perfect, but Ted was in control of all of it. Tulips are often a symbol of love and perennials are almost synonymous with lasting forever, so the distinction of Ted separating them means he entered the relationship knowing it wasn't going to last. This fits in with Rose’s theory that Ted is trying to get rid of her as fast as possible and her mother also thinks that he might be having an affair, furthering the idea that Rose is temporary to him.  His control of their marriage is further defined with the aloe cutting gifted to Rose by Lena. The cutting was a gesture of friendship from Lena, but it didn’t fit in with the rest of the garden because there were no other succulents. This is a demonstration of how Ted doesn’t really factor Rose into his life. Her friends and family aren’t important and don’t have a place in his perfectly coiffed garden. There’s nothing else like the aloe cutting because he hasn’t allowed for it, there’s nothing in the garden that reflects any aspect of Rose. His control over their marriage served to erase Rose from any importance to Ted. After he left, his perfect garden festered into what Rose let it become. When Ted came back to discuss what he thought would be nothing she tells him "’I like it this way.’" Ted has to free himself from a "blackberry vine that had meandered onto the walkway", a small piece of who Rose is now is something that he has to brush off. Ted calls the remains of his garden "'a mess'", but he fails to see that Rose enjoys what she’s become without him. The decay of their “perfect” marriage gave her the freedom to be who she was the entire time, she flourished and even grew the confidence to decide she was staying.

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Due to many of Ying-Ying's warnings relating back to a forced pregnancy, it can be inferred that it is her worst fear, and she had to live through both the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy and birth. Her main coping mechanism was her organization of the house. Lena grew up with the idea that the layout of her home would be something that she could control and would provide her with security but in her marriage with Harold, that's not the case. Harold gives her false agency by allowing Lena to pay for smaller items and services, but she still has very little control in regard to their relationship. Since Harold is in complete control over the house Lena doesn't have the same kind of control that her mother had in her crisis, so her method of coping is being taken away by the very thing that she needs to cope with, the lack of control she has in her marriage. Control as a coping mechanism has been with Lena since she was a teenager. Back then she dealt with anorexia and as an adult, she deals with disordered eating and restriction as a way of controlling what little she can.

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After Bing's death, An-Mei lost some of her faith in God because she realized that she put so much trust in him that she'd become careless. This is the point she decided that she wasn't going to let anybody else make decisions for her because that's what happened with Bing. For Rose, this incident bred indecision because she made none of her own choices in the situation. She watched her brothers because she was told to and she especially watched Bing out of her own volition, but the minute somebody else made the decision that she should look away was when Bing fell.
When Ted sent the divorce papers and a final check, Rose was plagued with indecision and overthought as she looked at the packet. After weeks of not signing the documents, Ted called her and she had a surge of confidence and told him to meet her, even if there was nothing to talk about. She led him to the garden that had grown over in the absence of his care, without his careful manicuring.

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Ying-Ying St. Clair is a Chinese immigrant who came to America amidst the war back in China. She raised her only child, a daughter named Lena St. Clair, with a set of graphic warnings to scare her away from every possible danger, stretching a stranger on the street to a death of a thousand cuts, but most of the warnings somehow circled back to the idea of being forced to have a baby. During an incident where a man ran at her on the street, she dropped Lena's hand in a panic and immediately regretted not being able to protect her more. She would begin obsessively organizing the furniture in the apartment, which Lena's dad would tell her was simply a "nesting instinct" as it was revealed that Ying-Ying was pregnant. Lena observed that her mother was never happy during the pregnancy and she ended up giving birth to a baby boy that seemingly died in utero. Ying-Ying fell into a daze and continued to re-arrange the house because it was really the only thing that gave her any semblance of comfort.

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An-Mei Hsu is a mother of 6 and a member of the Joy Luck Club alongside Ying-Ying St. Clair. She was devoutly religious and believed that her strong faith in God would allow her to do about anything she set her mind to. She originally had 4 sons and 3 daughters, but her youngest son drowned in an indecent, resulting in her placing the Bible, she previously carried every day, under a leg of the dining table. Her youngest daughter, Rose, was tasked with looking after her younger brothers during a trip to the beach. She especially looked after Bing because he was the youngest. She watched him edge closer and closer to the water while telling him to come back, but her mother told her to dissolve a fight between the other three brothers, and when she looked back Bing had fallen in. The family would go home after searching for his body to express the remorse they all held for what they could have done differently to prevent Bing's death.

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Lena St. Clair is married to a man named Harold; they both work at an architecture firm that is partially owned by Harold. They tried to build their relationship on a foundation of love and equality, where money would never be a problem. When Lena pushed Harold to start his own firm he became her boss and started to earn more money so he reasoned that he should get to make all the decisions about the design of their new house because he was paying for more of it. They started keeping lists of their expenses to make sure that what they spent was always roughly the same amount. Despite her best efforts, Lena couldn't quite convince herself that she and Harold were really equals. He became so obsessed with fairness that it distracted from the complete power imbalance her created when he "evenly" divided their assets in their marriage agreement. They each got a percentage of the estate that corresponded to how much money they each made, but those amounts are rooted in Harold underpaying Lena. He refused to promote her because he wanted to be fair to her coworkers which left her stuck in a lower ranking and paying job, letting Harold get away with owning most of the house.

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Rose studied at UC Berkeley where she met her ex-husband Ted Jordan. They got married before Ted started medical school, much to the dismay of both their mothers. Rose found comfort in Ted's confidence and how he made decisions and never regretted them. Eventually, Ted would graduate and become a facial surgeon, but he would get sued for malpractice and grow tired of making all the decisions. He pushed Rose to take up more responsibilities in their relationship and became increasingly frustrated over Rose's indecisiveness. After leaving for a seminar Ted called Rose asking for a divorce and send over the needed papers for her to sign.

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"Wah!" cried the mother upon seeing the mirrored armoire in the master suite of her daughter's new condominium. "You cannot put mirrors at the foot of the bed. All your marriage happiness will bounce back and turn the opposite way."
"Well, that's the only place it fits, so that's where it stays," said the daughter, irritated that her mother saw bad omens in everything. She had heard these warnings all her life. The mother frowned, reaching into her twice-used Macy's bag.
"Hunh, lucky I can fix it for you, then." And she pulled out the gilt-edged mirror she had bought at the Price Club last week. It was her housewarming present. She leaned it against the headboard, on top of the two pillows.
"You hang it here," said the mother, pointing to the wall above. "This mirror sees that mirror—haule!—multiply your peach-blossom luck."
"What is peach-blossom luck?"
The mother smiled, mischief in her eyes. "It is in here," she said, pointing to the mirror. "Look inside. Tell me, am I not right? In this mirror is my future grandchild, already sitting on my lap next spring."
And the daughter looked—and haule! There it was: her own reflection looking back at her.

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"Do not ride your bicycle around the corner," the mother had told the daughter when she was seven.
"Why not!" protested the girl.
"Because then I cannot see you and you will fall down and cry and I will not hear you."
"How do you know I'll fall?" whined the girl.
"It is in a book, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, all the bad things that can happen to you outside the protection of this house."
"I don't believe you. Let me see the book."
"It is written in Chinese. You cannot understand it. That is why you must listen to me."
"What are they, then?" the girl demanded. "Tell me the twenty-six bad things."
But the mother sat knitting in silence.
"What twenty-six!" shouted the girl.
The mother still did not answer her.
"You can't tell me because you don't know! You don't know anything!" And the girl ran outside, jumped on her bicycle, and in her hurry to get away, she fell before she even reached the corner.

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In The Joy Luck Club, author Amy Tan explores the lives of 4 Chinese mothers and their first-generation American daughters proving how stories, values, and trauma can all be passed down throughout life.
The Joy Luck Club is formed of Chinese immigrant mothers and their husbands in San Francisco, based on a version of the club back in China where women played mahjong to boost morale during the second Sino-Japanese war. There are 4 sections of chapters, each prefaced with a short story that sets the theme that the following chapters are based on.