Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club tells the story of four Chinese women in San Francisco who come together to play mah jong and invest in stocks. They also speak their stories to one another, sharing with the only people they believe will understand. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club, and in this novel Amy Tan allows these characters to tell their stories. The novel is more complex than this, however, for the daughter of one of the original four replaces her mother upon that mother's death, and she now begins to hear these stories she has not had the privilege to hear until now. The entire experience becomes a melding of generations and the opportunity for understanding across generations, showing the younger woman how she is linked not only to her mother but to the experience of an entire people, her people.

Amy Tan was born in 1952 in Oakland, and to a great extent this novel may be seen as her story and the story of her mother. She is herself a member of the culture she describes in the novel, and the time period of that novel covers the history of a certain immigrant experience in this century as Chinese fleeing the terrors of the Revolution came to the United stats seeking peace and a better life. Yet, as can be seen in this novel, they never lose their ties to their homeland and may gather together in order to preserve that culture to the degree possible and to celebrate it as the four women do as they play mah jong and talk each week.

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ways one of the most difficult because of the need to adjust to a different level of racism and cultural shock. The stories of the daughters emerge more obliquely to show a different sort of journey for each, a journey of self-discovery and understanding. Each member of the younger generation can be seen as a child of the fifties, part of the baby boom generation in American parlance, and each has made a place for herself in American society by fulfilling the American idea of success. Each also sees her mother as somewhat difficult, which means that mother and daughter are from different generations and different worlds and have never come together to achieve an understanding. Jingmei Woo is the narrator who appears several months after her mother's death, and the three surviving members of the Joy Luck Club have decided to send Jing-mei to China to find her lost half sisters. Her journey is to be both physical and spiritual, and though it comes too late for her to find agreement with her mother in person, she can come to an understanding of her mother and to the recognition of her mother's courageous struggle long before she was born. Rose Hsu Jordan is bound by the past, but only by the past she remembers, specifically

Category: Literature - A