Possible plot-hole question

there are different dialects in china. so people in the north might speak differently then people in the south. or the people in rural country regions talk differently and have different words/names for things then the people who live in more urban areas.

I believe that in the book Jing-Mei is taught to speak Madarin better by her father and the other members of Joy Luck Club so she can go to see her sisters.

I assumed that she didn't speak Chinese - she'd simply memorized a few phrases to say to her sisters when she arrived. Remember, she isn't conversing with her sisters - just stating a few phrases at the beginning.

She's going to have a tough time in China unable to speak the language. That was still my impression when the movie ended!

All she did was say a few phrases to her sisters. You don't have to be fluent in Chinese to memorize a few phrases in Mandarin. And her Mandarin was definitely not perfect.

In the opening credit voiceover sequence, June is telling the story of the swan feather, which is her mother's story. In the story, her mother says that, "In America, no one will look down on her (her unborn/future daughter) because I will make her speak perfect English." It's her mother's intention to have June speak fluent, untainted, English so that she will assimilate easier in American society. She probably feels that teaching her Mandarin at the same time might hinder that process. So what limited Mandarin that June knows is picked up from listening to her parents and her aunts' conversations. This is interesting in that it is because June is so Americanized in her thinking that mother and daughter have such a hard time communicating and understanding each other. June never fully understands the significance of the story until the very end when she realizes the weight of her mother's well intentions for her and her half-sisters.

In perfect Mandarin?!? I must assume you are a scholar of the language if you can make such a statement. Mandarin is a very difficult language to learn to speak due to the complex inflections. It would seem unlikely that a girl growing up in America could learn to speak the language perfectly. She probably had enough to express herself adequately, but certainly not enough to follow three elderly native speakers who are all speaking at once. I have learned the Persian language well enough to hold conversations with Iranians, but when I'm amongst a group of them and they are in full conversational mode, I struggle to follow what is being said.

I grew up in Canada. I'm a native English speaker. I also speak Mandarin. When I am around native Mandarin speakers, especially when they are speaking quickly, I do not understand much of what they are saying.





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Well it's about a 5,000 hour flight to China, so she probably read "Mandarin for Dummies" on the plane and learned just enough to say "Mom's dead," "I love you" and "please pass the soy sauce."