The Ever-changing Story

In the book “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tam, Suyuan Woo's mysterious Kweilin story changed many times:

“The endings always changed. Sometimes she said she used that worthless thousand-yuan note to buy a half-cup of rice. She turned that rice into a pot of porridge. She traded that gruel for two feet from a pig. Those two feet became six eggs, those eggs six chickens. The story always grew and grew. In other versions of the story, Suyuan Woo would changed that half-cup of rice into a pot of porridge, and this would keep changing for different versions of the story.” (Page 25)

I have many theories on why the mother would keep doing this to the story when telling it to her daughter. One theory that I have is that the mother wanted to teach a lesson to her daughter of that she shouldn't ever stop at something and that she should always persist on no matter what just like how the stories kept going on even though it was thought to be over. She wants her daughter to keep growing and growing and never stop.

Another theory that I have of why Suyuan Woo changes the Kweilin ending so many time is that she wanted to keep the story interesting. Maybe she was afraid that her daughter would get bored and lose interest in the meaning of the story so she kept changing the ending up to make it interesting for her daughter. This would make her daughter look forward to hear the story again and again since the story ending would change and won't be the same.

The last theory that I came up with is that her mother uses the story as an excuse to persuade and change the view of her daughter. For example, in the story, the daughter said that she begged her mother to buy a transistor radio for her, but her mother refused and begin telling a story:

“And then one evening, after I had begged her to buy me a transistor radio, after she refused and I sulked in silence for an hour...And then she told me a completely different ending to the story.” (Page 25)

The way how Suyuan Woo manipluate her daughter is by manipulating the stories. She changed the story benefiting the situation that she is facing with her daughter at the moment . This would allow Suyuan Woo to have control over her daughter because her story would changes the views on the whole problem.