The Joy Luck Club

Jing-mei 'June' Woo takes her dead mother's place at the Joy Luck Club mahjong table. The mothers reveal that Suyuan's twin daughters, abandoned in China during the war, have been found — and ask June to go to China to meet them as her mother's representative.

Jing-mei reconstructs her mother's story of escaping Kweilin during the Japanese invasion — and the terrible moment when she was forced to abandon her infant twin daughters by the roadside.

An-mei, as a child, witnesses her disgraced mother's return to the family. Her grandmother forbids contact. An-mei's mother cuts flesh from her own arm to make soup for An-mei's dying grandmother — a gesture of filial devotion. Years later, An-mei watches her mother become a Fourth Wife to a rich man and ultimately commit suicide to free her daughter.

Sixteen-year-old Lindo is given in marriage to a boy she barely knows, enters a household that treats her as property, and engineers her own escape through cunning and observation rather than open rebellion. Later, she reflects on what she gave her daughter Waverly and what she accidentally took away.

Ying-ying, as a four-year-old, falls off a boat during the Moon Festival and is separated from her family — an early experience of becoming 'lost.' As an adult, she had a first marriage in China to a cruel man, drowned her own infant son in a moment of violence, and spent years as a ghost of herself before marrying Harold St. Clair. Now she realizes she made her daughter Lena as hollow as she became.

Child prodigy Waverly becomes a national chess champion at nine. She fights her mother Lindo for the right to own her own accomplishments. As an adult, she prepares to introduce her second husband Rich to Lindo and dreads the inevitable criticism — only to discover that what Lindo feels is pride she doesn't know how to express.

Rose's marriage to Ted Jordan is disintegrating. She traces her passivity to her childhood, when her youngest brother Bing drowned in the ocean while Rose was watching him. Her mother An-mei placed the Bible under a short table leg believing God would bring Bing back. He didn't. Now Rose cannot assert herself in her own life — and An-mei tells her she must speak up or lose everything.

Lena watches her marriage to Harold dissolve into a false 'equality' that is actually erasure. Jing-mei travels to China, meets her half-sisters, and sees her mother's face reflected in theirs. The novel's two strands — what was lost, and what can still be recovered — converge.