An exceptional talent, Amy Tan presents a delightful debut that breaks down Chinese culture and racial stereotypes Americans have long criticized. Tan has an innate ability to weave Chinese ancestry and fiction into a novel so beautifully written, she becomes a defining voice for families of Asian-American descent. Vignettes are purposeful to the novel because it highlights faith, family and food {mottos I live by in my life} as being an integral part of their culture and how immigrating to America forces one to struggle with identity crises and issues. Though the vignettes, readers are cascaded into a variety of emotions–––pain, anguish, optimism, pleasure and peace. I find it incredible that a book that's been around for nearly 30 years still shows relevance in today's society. I judge a book not by it's cover (no pun intended) but by the following, with each star rating representing each one: Content, Language/Vernacular, Ability to Set a Theme, Plot or Setting, Association to the Real World, and Characters. Now that I've given you the spiel on my opinion of the book, let me describe the synopsis to you. It is 1949 and four Chinese women, An-Mei Hsu, Suyuan Woo, Ying-Ying St. Clair and Lindo Jong, recently immigrate to San Francisco after what is presumably World War II in which they start playing mah jong, indulge in dim sun and to engage in stories of their personal plights they encountered during their differentiating childhoods and adulthoods. They name this ritual, The Joy Luck Club.Content: 1/1- Amy Tan's execution of The Joy Luck Club was astounding and astonishing! Both because she subconciously broke racial barriers against Chinese stereotypes we {Americans} have thought for so long and registered emotions within me I thought dead. You can't help but feel sympathy for the stories of the women telling them and to feel empowered by their strength. The novel included proverbs, scriptures and anecdotes that made me think two things after the completion of reading it: a) "Chinese women are wise," and b) "To give up on a dream is to sacrifice a soul once free now burdened with hostility, hardship and irrevocable sadness. (My quote and take away from the book). Although this was the astounding part, the astonishing part was how much of a autobiographical memoir of Amy Tan's this felt like. It was clear to me she was the character of Jing-Mei Woo, Suyuan Woo's daughter, as was evident by the references to her profession, relationships, and the like. In reality ,all of the characters took parts of Tan's life and bore resemblance to her, which I valued and appreciated because it showed how much she dedicated herself to the genealogy of her family tree and to preserve the past and their legacy.Language/Vernacular: 1/1- The use of combining both Chinese and English vocabulary was a brilliant idea because like the characters in the book, it associated itself with trying to adjust to American life and yet hold on to Chinese ties. The words weren't just words but to me they held and still hold sentimental value. Like the meaning of "tyandi" (heaven and earth) or "chi" (the spirit that caused so much pain), I not only expanded my vocabulary but opened my mind to learning a new language and culture. And speaking of said language, I was proud of Tan's ability to help her predominantly American readers distinguish the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin. Ability to Set a Theme, Plot or Setting: 0/1- Let's face the fact that although her execution of the culture, customs and the values within the culture was delivered effortlessly, her execution of the so-called plot which was supposed to be four women gathering to play mah jong, failed miserably because the mention of mah jong was so vague, it was almost unnoticeable. Had she improved on making the connection of the women's lives to why mah jong was of importance, the story would have perpetual sustainability.Association to the Real World: 1/1- I don't think I should have to go into details as I've mentioned it several times already. But the story holds true to how people criticize people of another culture and discriminate against them based on a number of things: gender (the women in the book were raised with antiquated ways and deemed to be nothing more than housewives which they were successful at), race (noticeable differences between someone from Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Ghangzhou), and social status (Ying-Ying St. Clair was the only one of the four to grow up with wealth). The identity crises was a big focal point in the book and it captured that but the question that remained and still remains in my mid was and is: "How does this relate to the sole purpose of The Joy Luck Club––to play mah jong).Characters: 0.5/1-The novel was told from seven different perspectives which made it difficult to distinguish the mothers from their daughters. I found myself going back and forth between the page with the list of mothers and daughters constantly. To add to this imprudence, most of the characters seemed one-dimensional. The only characters I found interesting in the book (and perhaps it's because I'm impartial to them) is clearly An-Mei Su and Ying-Ying St. Clair. They're chapters is the reason I continued to read it even after dozing off a dozen times because of it. Page 145 in my edition began with Part Three of the novel titled, "American Traditions" and my favorite chapter was An-Mei's called "Magpies" (pgs. 215-41).Overall, the book is a strong effort and I strongly recommend it to anyone who is a historical fiction and memoir guru who enjoy writers with complex writing styles. Final star rating: 3.5!
4.5 starsThe blurb on this edition focusses on the struggles of mothers and daughters to understand and help each other, and Tan's skill in conveying emotions. As usual, there is no acknowledgement of the book as a feminist work, so I'm going to begin by hailing it as such in all its woman-oriented glory. Aside from the fact that men are merely accessory to all of the narrative strands, and that the majority of conversations are between women and girls, Tan positively critiques patriarchal tropes throughout by revealing the constrictions on women's lives imposed structurally through their chattel position as wives and mothers, through their socialisation by older women, and through the domineering behaviour of men. Very overt features of gendered hierarchies which tend to hide in plain sight are kept in view, and Tan writes very cleverly to reveal more subtle aspects, making them evident in countless interactions, punctuating these little revelations with pauses for contemplation. Below the surface swim slow thoughts lightly veiled:Even the old ladies had put on their best clothes to celebrate: Mama's aunt, Baba's mother and her cousin, and Great-uncle's fat wife, who still plucked her forehead bald and always walked as if she were crossing a slippery stream, two tiny steps and a scared lookThis is surely an intimation, from a child's perspective, that the woman has bound feet. The treatment of An-Mei's mother, who has become a concubine to a rich man after being widowed, illuminates some of the distinctive features of (pre-communist) Chinese heteropatriarchy. However, Tan is not about to aid the cause of USian supremacy and White saviourism by setting stories like this against a mythical American equality; her depictions of marriages and relationships in the US reveal a different but hardly better situation for women, especially Chinese/immigrant women for whom White husbands feel entitled to speak.My favourite mother-as-girl story is Lindo Jong's. Trapped in a marriage that places her in servitude to an exacting and heartless mother-in-law, she nonetheless uses great ingenuity. The moment when she recognises her impressive inner resources is striking; few girls can rely on such self-confidence and awareness, but even so armed, her empowerment is very limited, so the story throws light on the real plight of girls like her. I was even more fascinated though, by the ways that Chinese cultural values and traditions played out in her scheming. This happened throughout the book; modes of modesty, influencing of feelings and events, showing love, all revealed ways of knowing and being rooted in different soils and waters and fed by different suns from those that have nourished me. Miscommunication, misunderstanding, is inevitable in the meeting of USian directness and the more subtle, artful Chinese manner of expression, heedful of hidden feelings deduced through the fine filaments of perceptive empathy only a combination of shared culture, affinity and thoughtfulness can forge. Careful reading reveals that supposed 'directness' leaves many things sadly incommunicable. Much humour is made at the mothers' expense:One day, as she struggled to weave a hard-toothed comb through my disobedient hair, I had a sly thought. I asked her 'Ma, what is Chinese torture?' My mother shook her head. A bobby pin was wedged between her lips. She wetted her palm and smoothed the hair above my ear, then pushed the pin in so that it nicked sharply against my scalp. 'Who say this word?' she asked without a trace of knowing how wicked I was being. I shrugged my shoulders and said 'Some boy in my class said Chinese people do Chinese torture.' 'Chinese people do many things,' she said simply. 'Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.'This kind of intimate mockery is hilarious, but a risky thing to gift to an outsider like me. I had the feeling that I must be careful not to generalise beyond time, place and particularity, to find myself thinking 'I know this about Chinese mothers, because I read it in The Joy Luck Club'. Another difficulty I had was with disturbing aspects of anti-Blackness and homophobia which I wanted to chase up, but which had to be let drop, presumably for the next generation, the grandaughters, to decolonise. I enjoyed, on the other hand, the wry laughs minted from the thoughtlessness self centredness of ignorant White men.Degrees of integration vary, but all of the mothers are at some stage shocked by the extent of their daughters' assimilation into USian culture, while the daughters feel to some extent cut off from their Chinese heritage. If I wanted to extract a lesson, it would be: maintain your culture against Whiteness! Whatever is in you or known to you that is not White, honour it, nourish it, tell it, create with it, share it, weave it into the new stories you live and make. It takes, surely, deep effort and much energy to resist the action of White supremacy, the hollowing out of living cultures into exotified fetishes, consumable and subsumed. I recommend this book especially to those who like reading about food, as I do. Tan presents a culture relentlessly attentive to good eating, the comforts of the table, and the expression of love through cooking. The demythologising fortune cookie story, brilliantly conceived, is, to me, this book in a nutshell.
What do You think about The Joy Luck Club (2006)?
I love Amy Tan - and I'd like to say it's not because I am Asian, but honestly, that is part of it! Joy Luck Club is one of my ALL time favs. My Mom turned me onto it. The movie is good, also! I have read most of her books - you should give them a shot, too! Love you!
—Betsy McGee
I ♥ way Amy Tan explores mother-daughter relationship dynamics in THE JOY LUCK CLUB.Lisa: Ms. Tan, I loved the “Joy Luck Club.” It really showed me how the mother-daughter bond can triumph over adversity.Amy Tan: No, that’s not what I meant at all, you couldn’t have gotten it more wrong.Lisa: But…Amy Tan: Please, just sit down. I’m embarrassed for both of us.Ha! THE JOY LUCK CLUB is so much more than mother-daughter relationships! It’s a spectacular story with all sorts of complex themes — none of which I will be discussing in this review because I read this book for pure enjoyment and took zero notes while reading!
—Beth Sniffs Books
The book started off with Jing-Mei Woo, who was asked to sit in as one of the four players in the Joy Luck Club. She was to replace her mother who had recently passed away. The Joy Luck Club consists of four women who played a common Chinese game, and base on what I have seen it is usually used for gambling. The Joy Luck Club is what develops the plot because it is where we get the stories of each of the women in it.This book is separated into four sections. In all of these sections there would be a chapter where Jing-Mei Woo talks about her relationship with her mother. Each chapter in the first and last sections was about the three other women in the Joy Luck Club. It was written in their point of view. In these chapters they would talk about their past and their relationships with their mothers. Then they would talk about their relationships with their daughters. The next two sections were about the daughters of the three other women in the Joy Luck Club and they were written in their point of view. These chapters would be about their life and then about their relationship with their mothers. This is a weird way to write a book but it makes sense to write it that way so that we can hear the voices of each of these characters and their mother-daughter issues. Throughout the book she would also include the pronunciation of Chinese words: “Yiding” meaning must. This was pretty interesting to me because as a Chinese person I did not understand more than half of it. The author also kept me reading probably because I personally am interested in these stories. A part of the book was about the history of China and people’s experiences back then. Jing-Mei Woo’s mother was force to give up her two children when the Japanese attacked China. She was walking to escape the Japanese with a lot of her belongings and her two children. First she was force to leave her belonging and then the food and then the children. Back then in China, the parents usually get to decide whom their child gets marry to and sometimes they decide even before the child was born. They would do this for the family’s benefit. Lindo Jong was sentenced to marry a boy she didn’t meet until she was about eight or nine. This is similar to most ancient Chinese movies I have seen, the women would then be married to the man, and then she would find a way to get the man to leave her. These stories interest me and it reminds me of those times when my mom would tell me about her stories.
—Aileen
