Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), May 2021

+PROS

• Accessible language and writing style for a wide audience of readers
• Generational comparisons; Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters
• Heavy focus on miscommunication and misunderstanding (culturally, linguistically, etc.)

-CONS

• Organizational style makes it somewhat difficult to follow specific mother-daughter pairs at times
• Not all characters receive full closure in the end, but most do!

*GREAT GRAYS

• Writing chapters in a novel that could stand alone as short stories too
• A story arc that doesn’t need to show a character’s entire life to feel full
• How to make the reader sympathetic for a generation that is not their own

“Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl” (p. 241).

Four Chinese immigrant mothers and four American-born daughters struggle to find common ground. Each pair sifts through past trauma, cultural differences, and memories where language failed them. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club opens from the perspective of Jing-mei “June” Woo two months after her mother’s death. Jing-mei has been asked to take her mother’s place as the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club, playing mah jong with three of her mother’s oldest friends since all four women had arrived in San Francisco in 1949. It is from this chapter that the narrative branches out, as if in the direction of the four winds, to follow each woman’s journey to the United States as well as their daughter’s experiences growing up with the American culture and English language. The staple that holds the novel’s many voices together is Jing-mei’s constant narration, featured in each of the book’s sections. She alone has the burden of telling both her own story and that of her mother’s.

“My father thinks she was killed by her own thoughts” (p. 5).

Each time I picked up this book, reading from either the perspective of a mother or daughter, I was reminded to pause and reflect on the complicated relationship I have with my own mother; the many words left unsaid, the memories I’ve been told a million times, and those I will never hear for one reason or another. While there is certainly common themes of miscommunication and misunderstandings among the four pairs, the way in which these obstacles are addressed is unique for each character. Jing-mei attempts to piece together her mother’s past: fleeing an approaching Japanese army and gradually leaving behind everything she held dear, including her twin daughters. As Rose’s marriage crumbles, her mother An-mei reflects on the sacrifices her own mother had to make as a rich man’s third concubine. Since childhood, Waverly feels in competition with her mother, a never-ending chess match that Lindo is always winning in her daughter’s eyes. Ying-Ying and her daughter, Lena, live in fear of themselves and those around them. And that fear seems to settle into a deafening silence with too many words left unsaid.

“For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me…And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others” (p. 64).

The writing style and syntax are simplistic and elegant. There are so many lovely, thought-provoking lines but the language isn’t too complex or convoluted, ensuring the story’s accessibility to a wide range of readers. Uniquely, many of the chapters could stand alone as short stories, leaving the reader satisfied each time they put the book down. In this way, Tan proves that a character’s entire life does not need to be covered for the story to feel full. Only specific memories or moments in a character’s life are depicted, leaving most of their lives a mystery, but I do not feel short-changed or unsatisfied.

I really enjoyed the linguistic diversity and intercultural elements infused in each woman’s story. The attempts to translate between Chinese and English, and how difficult it is to reach a mutual understanding, were eye-opening. It reminds me of Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory. According to Hofstede’s model, Chinese culture is categorized as having as indirect communication style while American culture has a direct communication style. Tan’s The Joy Luck Club exemplifies this model. As these mothers fight to pass along lessons they learned growing up in China, their daughters struggle to apply those lessons to their lives in the United States.

Other books like this…

• Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City (novel)
• Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires (novel)
• Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife (novel)