The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
Summary
Four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American born daughters in San Francisco narrate sixteen interlocking stories arranged in four sections. June Woo takes her late mother Suyuan's place at the mahjong table of the Joy Luck Club, the social circle Suyuan founded in wartime China, and eventually travels there herself to meet the twin half sisters Suyuan was forced to abandon by a roadside while fleeing the Japanese invasion, carrying the news of their mother's death and, with it, a story June has spent her whole life not understanding. The other mothers carry comparable histories: An Mei Hsu's own mother took her life as a calculated act of protest against becoming a rich man's concubine; Lindo Jong talked her way out of an arranged child marriage by inventing a curse against her husband's family; Ying Ying St. Clair, married young to a cruel and unfaithful man, ended her pregnancy in despair before immigrating and remarrying. Their daughters carry lighter but related weights: Waverly Jong, once a chess prodigy exploited by her mother's pride in her; Rose Hsu Jordan, still blaming herself for her younger brother's drowning; Lena St. Clair, only slowly recognizing the imbalance inside her own marriage. The novel closes with June meeting her half sisters at the airport in Shanghai, the three women seeing their mother's face appear, unmistakably, in each other.
Reading it means following short, self contained chapters that jump between mother and daughter, between 1940s China and 1980s California, asking patience early before the structure resolves into a larger pattern of parallel loss and repair. Tan gives each of the eight narrators a distinct voice, which is the book's real achievement: eight separate people rather than two generations standing in for each other.
Historical Context & Significance
G. P. Putnam's Sons published The Joy Luck Club in 1989, and the Commonwealth Club of California awarded it a gold medal for fiction, a real prize the book actually took even as two more prominent ones passed it by. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, which went to John Casey's Spartina, and for the National Book Critics Circle Award, which went to E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate. Carolyn See in the Los Angeles Times called it astonishingly accomplished and said she would never again be able to read it for the first time, and Kirkus Reviews praised it as a splendid first novel.
Not every response was admiring. The critic Frank Chin argued through the 1990s that Tan's version of Chinese culture, mahjong, concubines, arranged marriage, played to what a largely white readership already expected rather than complicating it, a charge Tan and her defenders have disputed ever since. Wayne Wang directed the 1993 film adaptation, with Tan co writing the screenplay alongside Ronald Bass, and the novel has stayed continuously in print and widely taught for more than three decades, helping open mainstream publishing to the wave of Asian American fiction that followed it.