In Amy Tan's novel, The Joy Luck Club, the main families, the Woo's, the St. Clair's, the Hsu's, and the Jong's tell about their stories and their lives. The conflict in this novel is mother vs. daughter. This is so because they are very different, the mother from China and the daughter from America. In the parable "Queen Mother of the Western Skies" a grandmother looks at her grandchild and sees hem laughing so innocently that she would like to be able to laugh like that, but she can't because she has been through so much in her life the she is now bitter. She hopes that the kid can make his mom happy and innocent so that they can never loose hope. The parable "Queen Mother of the Western Skies" relates to the stories in the chapters, "Waiting Between the Trees", "Magpies", and "Double Face."

In "Waiting...