The Joy Luck Club

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The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan
1989

The Summary
Jing-Mei (June) Woo has lost her mother, Suyuan, and must now take her mother's seat at the Joy Luck Club.  As she speaks to her mother's friends, she learns a stunning secret:  the twin daughters that Suyuan left behind are alive and wish to meet her.

Thus, begins June's journey to remember her mother and meet her sisters, just as Rose Hsu, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair learn to reconnect with their mothers and reclaim one more piece of family history.

The Good
Simultaneously heart-warming and heart-wrenching, The Joy Luck Club is a wonderful collection of stories that recounts the lives of mothers and daughters - Chinese immigrants and their American-born children - as they struggle to bridge a gap in language and culture to communicate and, more importantly, find common ground.

What makes Amy Tan's novel so appealing, however, is that it's readily accessible for readers.  Although The Joy Luck Club prominently features Chinese and American culture (individuals learning how to embrace and/or acclimate to one or the other),
Tan's work doesn't focus on one nationality over the other.

This novel holds many universal themes that offer a deeper connection to the work and to the individual characters.  It is about human emotion and experience, perspective of mothers and daughters as they learn to listen to one another and, finally, connect.

The Bad
My primary difficulty lay with distinguishing each story and figuring out how they matched, how each mother's story matched her daughter's narrative; however, I believe that's more attributed to my personal confusion than anything else.

The Ugly
Not all the stories you read will be pretty.  You will find eloquent tales with beautiful imagery and emotional narratives that will shed light on both Chinese and American culture; however, many of these stories will be tragic and many more will be heart-breaking.

In particular, it's important to note that all of the mothers - Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, Ying-ying St. Clair - lived through World War II and faced the turmoil of that era.  They experienced damaging social upheaval, political strife, and human depravity, and all of their stories reflect the tragedies they faced during World War II and the tribulations they endured in emigrating to America.

It's not always a pretty picture.