Amy Tan, in her novel The Joy Luck Club, seeks to portray two generations of Chinese-American women in order to honor their lives, though fictional, and to have the reader appreciate their humanity, heritage, courage and culture. If there is one theme it is the theme of cultural, generational and familial continuity and endurance. Tan wants the reader to understand the profound and intimate connections between the two generations of mothers and daughters and between the two cultures those generations bridge.
The brief opening tale sets the stage for the exploration and appreciation of this theme. A Chinese woman has brought a swan---which she is told was once a duck which stretched it neck trying to become a goose---to America to one day give to her unborn daughter as a symbol of the capacity to become "more than what was hoped for" (3). The bird is taken by customs officers, but the woman keeps a feather, hoping one day to give it to her daughter and to tell her the story and its meaning in "perfect American English" (4). This tale is an encapsulation of the message of the book, containing as it does the hope and ambition for a better life passed from the mothers to their daughters.
In fact, the Joy Luck Club itself was formed out of the desire of the narrator's mother for a sense of hope in the new world of America and a sense of continuity with the old world of China. When the narrator, Jing-Mei Woo, joins the Joy Luck Club after her mother's death, the other members emphasize the importance of remembering her mother. Again, the theme of hope and continuity is expressed, even if in a skeptical context. Jing-Mei first says she knows nothing about her mother, then, after the beseeching of the older women, she promises to tell her sisters (who did not know their mother) all about her. But the others "look at me with doubtful faces" (31). She offers them hope for continuity in their own lives:
They are frightened. In me, ...