Is there an overarching moral or lesson the mothers in the joy luck club try to pass down to their children?

I might consider love and marriage. The mother's intentionally or not pass on lessons. The fact that many of the mothers and daughters have unhappy marriages creates a common ground on which they can relate. But marriage has different meanings for each generation. For the mothers, it is permanent and not always based on love. Especialy in their marriages in China, it is a social necessity that they must secretly undermine in order to be happy. For the daughters, marriage is supposed to be the arena where they can be their true selves. However, like their mothers, they are hard-pressed to find true love or themselves in their marriages; rather, they must break up their marriages to find themselves. The one love that remains constant in the novel is that between mothers and daughters. No matter how strained it is by cultural and generational differences, it is indestructible. Love, like heritage, goes forward and backward through generations of females.