The Joy Luck Club

Well written and riveting, Amy Tan’s fictional masterpiece The Joy Luck Club bypasses the traditional straight narrative style and instead relates its story through alternating vignettes between four mothers and daughters. Besides revealing the intimate and often humorous details of the Chinese immigrant experience Tan presents to her American readers an affirmation of the universality of the human condition. The conflicts in the novel are generational (the mothers wonder if their Americanized brethren will retain any of their Chinese roots) yet timeless (the frustrated daughters wonder if their mothers will ever understand them). Tan’s eloquent yet realistic prose is a lifelike portrait of the families she represents: one would recognize the same mothers and daughters in Russia as well as China.

The cast of characters The mothers Suyuan Woo An-mei Hsu Lindo Jong Ying-ying St. Clair The daughters Jing-mei “June” Woo Rose Hsu Jordan Waverly Jong Lena St. Clair

The book’s vignettes are further subdivided into four sections, each with a central theme tying the stories together. The titles of each section are symbolic of the increasing changes within the families as they mature and adjust to American life. Feathers from a Thousand Li Away starts off with Jing-mei Woo telling us about the Joy Luck Club, an idea her mother had back in Kwelin during the years of war. Her mother’s three friends had, since 1949, met to play mah-jonng every month deep in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Here is where the mothers relate the stories of growing up in war-ravaged China, one even escaping an arranged marriage just to come to America. To the women, America represents freedom, the proverbial land of opportunity raised to mythic proportions:

My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.

Tan subtly shows us the immigrant’s raised and unrealistic expectations in this manner.

The Twenty-six Malignant Gates , the second division of the novel, brings us into the conflicted childhoods of the daughters, as they simultaneously struggle to please their Chinese mothers and their American schoolmates. Rose Hsu suffers an eating disorder, chess prodigy Waverly becomes estranged from the game because of her overbearing mother, and Jing-Mei ignores her dreams because she feels she cannot possibly measure to Waverly’s genius. Lena St.Clair becomes withdrawn as she realizes that her mother has an unexplainable clairvoyance when she predicts her childhood bully’s death, a clairvoyance that frightens Lena and makes her become aware of what she refers to as her “Chinese eyes.”

American Translation jumps us to the climax of the young girls (by now women’s) lives. Lena, Rose, and Waverly have all experienced broken loves, much to the chagrin of their parents that were raised to marry for life. The title is perhaps the most symbolic: raised with American ways and mores, the daughters have become a literal American translation of their own parents.

Queen Mother of the Western Skies is the last section of the novel, and perhaps the most compelling. The mothers for the last time have their voice, expressing mixed feelings of dismay and pride at their own children. All of the daughters, Rose, Waverly, Jing-mei, and Lena, have come to terms with their heritage and their own relationships for good. The book ends on a positive note, with Jing-mei finally visiting China and realizing how different she is from her mother, and how much she still needs to learn.

An instant bestseller, The Joy Luck Club ’s readership transcended Chinese-American circles and became an international favorite. In my opinion, some of the stories are classic: in the vignette Rules of the Game , the stereotypical Chinese chess prodigy is revealed to have actual feelings, even divorcing the sport after a spat with her mother, in Magpies An-mei Hsu gives us the breath-taking confession of her own mother having been a concubine in a sickeningly decadent Chinese household. Important Chinese words entered the American conscious: hulihudu - a feeling of desperate confusion upon making a startling discovery; chunwang chihan - if the lips are cold, the teeth are cold. In the beginning of each section, Tan elucidates a childhood story of Chinese mythology to introduce the themes that each character will talk about. To put it simply, The Joy Luck Club is a cultural immersion that would beat out a Let’s Go tourist guide any day of the week.

Also a movie, Tan’s popularity can be explained not only by the writing and storyline but by the fact that Americans rarely get a chance to glimpse at what other peoples can think of them. It is human nature to look for a gleam of recognition in another culture, and The Joy Luck Club provided just that for people sick of a restrained media and annoyingly politically correct censorship. The idea that adolescent angst is not just confined to the white, punk-rock loving teenage “rebels” of America was an idea that Tan saw to a joyful culmination.