The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan (1989)
“Four Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters, each trying to speak across a divide of language, pain, and love that neither side fully understands.”
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The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan (1989) · 288pages · Contemporary / Immigrant American · 8 AP appearances
Summary
Eight women — four Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters — gather around a mahjong table in San Francisco. Through a series of interlocking vignettes, each woman tells her story: the mothers' harrowing pasts in China and the enormous sacrifices they made crossing oceans, and the daughters' struggle to forge identities caught between two cultures. When one mother, Suyuan Woo, dies before she can reunite with the twin daughters she abandoned in China during the war, her daughter Jing-mei travels to China in her place, and the novel's twin strands — what was lost, what can still be found — converge.
Why It Matters
Published in 1989, The Joy Luck Club spent 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was the first widely-read novel in American literary culture to center the experiences of Chinese-American women ...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Fluid — the mothers' translated Chinese-inflected English carries parable structure and proverbial directness; the daughters' contemporary American English is conversational, ironic, self-questioning
Narrator: Multiple rotating narrators — four mothers and four daughters — with distinct registers. The governing tension is bet...
Figurative Language: High in the mothers' sections
Historical Context
1940s China (mothers' backstories) through 1980s San Francisco (daughters' present): The mothers' stories cannot be understood without the specific history of mid-20th century China: the Japanese invasion that destroyed families, the civil war that ended contact with the mainland, ...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- The novel has sixteen narrators. Why does Tan give us so many perspectives rather than following one narrator through the whole story? What is lost and gained with this approach?
- The mothers all tell their stories in a Chinese-inflected English that uses parable and indirection. The daughters narrate in contemporary American English. Is Tan suggesting one mode is more truthful than the other?
- An-mei's mother cuts flesh from her arm to make medicinal soup for the dying grandmother. In what sense is this an act of love rather than violence or desperation?
- Lindo Jong engineers her escape from an arranged marriage by using the household's superstitions against it. What does this reveal about the relationship between powerlessness and intelligence?
- Ying-ying says she 'willingly gave up her chi' and became a ghost after her first marriage. She then raised Lena in that ghost state. Is she responsible for Lena's hollowness, or is she a victim passing on damage she couldn't help?
Notable Quotes
“I wanted to give my daughter the swan — a creature that became more than what was hoped for. But in America I had to whisper.”
“I asked myself, what can I tell them about my mother? I don't know anything about her.”
“I walked away from them. I want to tell you this truth: I did not look back. This was not because I was cruel. It was because I had to save myself.”
Why Read This
Because every single person with a parent from a different world — different country, different class, different era, different trauma — will find themselves on these pages. The novel solves the problem of how to write about love that doesn't spea...