i teared up so many times for no specific reasons but i related a lot to the things that were being said. it's the first book recommended by my mum that i read, and it being a book about mother-daughter relationships and how being thorn between two cultures affect us means a lot to me. i loved the differents stories, as it was more like slices of life rather than a general arc, i think this format truly grew on me.

I am third generation born Chinese. I am so glad I found this book. Most of my life I always can see eye to eye with my mom. She is second generation born Chinese who already helping her family since age 12.

This book, explore all of those cultural aspect of mother and daughter that is born in different generation. how a daughter years her mother approval. But yet the mother seems aloof. I can relate to that.

Amy Tan’s extraordinary 1989 novel explores the divide between Chinese immigrants to the US and their children, first generation Americans being raised in San Francisco. Over games of mah jong and close-knit conversations, The Joy Luck Club delves into the backstories of four mothers and their four daughters. Their lives, especially their childhoods, are vastly different and yet interconnected in numerous ways that Tan recounts with equal parts anger and empathy.
— Book of the Month

Read more at https://www.bookofthemonth.com/add-ex...

* I work hard on my writing. I DO NOT want empty like button clicks. Comments, if you have them, are this writer's reward. :) *

After collecting Amy Tan’s well-regarded oeuvres, I needed to start with her story containing ghosts: “The Hundred Secret Senses”. Her characters were realistic, in an original, memorable adventure. I have proceeded 8 years later to her first story: “The Joy Luck Club”, 1989. It is general fiction but immerses us into extraordinary lives with different faces of China: class, gender, superstitious traditions, the grief of war. Contrasting cultural enrichment justified spotlighting three families, besides Jing-Mei Woo’s. I really liked and related to Lena St. Clair and Rose Hsu Jordan too.

Jing-Mei is 38, whose family knows three other immigrant couples. Each had Daughters. The Mothers and girls tell a story about their birthplaces. Along with Lena and Rose, I sympathized with the Moms in China. I disliked their demanding, critical attitudes in modern day San Francisco, USA. The perceived superficiality of western countries and modern society are commonly criticized, more likely stemming from the changing ages than from countries. Homesickness is understandable and differs from criticism. These women wisely left governments with gender and class inequality. Profound faith accompanies us wherever we are and easily form a part of a Daughter’s modern lifestyle. It is better to blend, not obliterate, mindsets.

This is not about Mah-jongg as I hoped. It is, however, an impressive reinvention of story structures. It sidesteps being a novel and short story suite, by reprising Jing-Mei’s quest with her Father in China at the end. After compassionate glimpses of the women in early life, around whom the girls grew up: Jing-Mei and her Father seek lost relatives. Jing-Mei’s Mother had died, like my Mom this year; which I tenderly related to firsthand. The emotionally happy ending shot my grade to five stars. I would have favoured that story to be the one that was elaborated upon.

* My experience was enriched by reading and discussing this cultural phenomenon with my New Zealander friend, Kerri.

I'm not generally someone who rereads a lot of books, but 30 years (!) seems to be the mark at which I become curious about whether I'll still feel the same way about some of my favorites. Amy Tan is an interesting case, because she's still writing novels, I've read nearly all of them, and I've liked them all—there aren't many authors I can say that about! It's a potential landmine to rereading, because all the things that seemed fresh and new about The Joy Luck Club have since become Tan's oft-imitated trademarks. Would the whole thing seem old-hat to me now?

Fortunately, this is where a scaffolding of good writing comes in handy. At this point in my life I'm less enamored of books with multiple narrators, and to be perfectly honest I had a little trouble keeping everyone straight, which I don't think was a problem the first time I read this. But the simple, lively writing, the humor, the great characters, the perfect level of detail—not too much or too little—was all just as I remembered, and the ending moved me to tears exactly as I'm sure it did the first time around. Back when The Joy Luck Club was a publishing sensation, I don't think we could've guessed it would be around forever, but except for one character getting a perm, this novel doesn't seem the least bit dated. If you've never read this before, what are you waiting for? And if you have, feel free to dive in again without reservation.

i love the term "modern classic"

Nearly 3 stars

This is one of those reads I picked up from my bookshelf because it happened to be ensconced between books which seemed less appealing at the time. Not that I was completely dissatisfied, I hoped to like it better. So I kept deferring putting together my thoughts in the hope that I might miss the characters or reminisce parts of the story after I bid farewell to the book. Sadly, distance didn't make the heart grow fonder. And this self-imposed separation might have faded the impressions that are fresh in the mind just after turning the last page.

Characters
The story revolves around four mother-daughter pairs and is structured as vignettes narrated in first-person. It sketches the characters through instances from their lives over the years -- the childhood and youth of the mothers in China before they moved to the US in the 1940s, the growing up years of the Chinese-American daughters, and the complicated relationships between the adult daughters and their mothers. For me, these slim vignettes were insufficient in painting eight distinct characters, making them seem indistinguishable at times; I had to refer to the index to confirm the mother/daughter in question.

A trip to China
The mothers' backgrounds in their home country had some interesting, heartfelt stories of fortitudinous women fighting patriarchy, extricating themselves from dire situations and some rather fantastical parts with overload of intuitive powers and a generous sprinkling of superstition. The position of women in China was, to put it mildly, not very enviable -- they were sometimes married off in childhood and sometimes had to vie to be the preferred concubine of a rich man to secure their financial position. 

Themes
The most prominent theme is the tender and bittersweet relationship between mothers and daughters which Amy Tan has adeptly captured. The daughters, first-generation Americans, are torn between their dual identities -- an ongoing tussle between their Americanized ways and their Chinese heritage, representative of the quintessential immigrant experience. There is a realistic exploration of friendship between women who come close in a foreign country and stay tied to each other by bonds of companionship, warmth, love, and a even a bit of jealousy. On the flip side, I found the stories of the daughters somewhat cliched as the only solutions for their predicaments centered around accepting their mother's advices and (tightly) embracing their cultural heritage. 

Amy Tan writes well. I found the prose rewarding and the historical perspective on Chinese society fascinating, but overall, this book hasn't enticed me to pick up her other works. If nothing else, this 1989 New York Times bestseller has made me look forward to reading more authors from China. 

P.S.
Yesterday, I came across this article by the author Manu Joseph where he explores the changing relationships between parents and children. For me, it resonated with what Amy Tan wrote. Manu Joseph discusses Rodrigo Garcia's (son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez) memoir "A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son's Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha and laments that "As children we thought that they didn't know us but now realize that we don't know them all that well either". Here is the link.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E84Ub0fVE...

4.5 stars

The 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 look

This 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.

I love this book! As a first generation child in this country (my parents immigrated from Vietnam), I could really relate to the girls in the story. I was the girl who played piano, always being forced to practice. Although I loved music and was a talented pianist, I quit because I couldn't deal with the pressure anymore. It wasn't for my enjoyment, it was to please my parents (or at least that's what it seemed like). I think we all have ways of dealing with the pressures of childhood.

A difference this book made for me was actually reading about Asian [American] people. Throughout my life/education, it was always the books about white people but I never experienced reading about my culture until I read Joy Luck Club. I like how she incorporates the old and the new. Obviously the girls' stories could not be told without knowing those of the mothers. I think Amy Tan is fabulous at painting the picture of everything involved in the Asian-Asian American immigrant-first generation experience: differences in culture, assimilating to the new country, passing down the old traditions, the rollercoaster of emotions all family members go through in a different way.

I have read Joy Luck Club many times. I think I want to read it again just after writing this review; it's that good.

Books like “The Joy Luck Club” are not really my usual fare, but I was curious about this one: I do enjoy stories about people who live in an overlap of different cultures, because that’s something I am quite familiar with; the preservation of cultural patrimony is also something very close to home, as both sides of my family tree are adamant about keeping their traditions alive, even if they have been in Canada for a generation or two at this point.

When Suyuan passes away, her daughter June is asked to take her place in the mah-jong club she founded when she arrived in America; by talking with her mother’s friends, their husbands and children, she will come to understand her in a way that might have not been possible had she still been alive. I think that the best way to enjoy this book is to take it as a collection of interconnected character studies, and the mutual influence their experience had on each other. Mother-daughter relationships are such a tricky thing to capture well, and Tan knows full well that such bonds are rife with love, but also misunderstandings. I have often wondered if parents will ever be able to truly understand their children, and vice versa.

The four Chinese women who emigrate to San Francisco after living through terrible hardships have a perspective their daughters simply don’t have. They want to preserve a patrimony, an echo of their culture, but their daughters do not feel the pull of a lost homeland, and simply want to live where they are now, in America. They grew up side by side with American kids, who find their parents’ ways strange and archaic, and don’t really get why they hang on so desperately to their ties to a place that saw the worse days of their lives unfold.

I know the book got very criticized about the stereotypical portrayals it features, and I admit that this is certainly a flaw. But from a point of view of pure literary enjoyment, I was more bothered by how choppy and repetitive it was. While the characters have very interesting stories, they can be hard to tell apart, though the classic repetition of patterns from generation to generation is perhaps more accurate than we might think. I think that if the book had focused only one mother-daughter duo, it might have had more room to breathe and develop the story. As it was, I felt that it was too episodic for me to get fully engaged.

Nevertheless, a lovely read about a layered and complicated subject. Worth checking out!

Ok, I admit it, I was obsessed with Amy Tan my first year of college. I learned all there was about her, read The Joy Luck Club, and finally I gave up hope.
As a freshmen, at Linfield College, I was astonished that Amy Tan could have possibly walked the same hallowed halls of Melrose, perhaps sat in the same offices in the English department, or read a book in Northrup's astro-turf room.
My daydreams were filled with her coming over to my dorm room to have tea and "talk literature." She would tell me what truly inspired her, some secrets and a few great jokes.
In reality, I spent a lot of time looking her up in the old yearbooks at the library, Oak Leaves circa 1970 and 1971 (I think). Horribly despicable. I did learn some of her secrets. I learned that she never graduated from Linfield, which pretty much means nothing...but I did discover that she (possibly) met her husband there, Mr. Lou DeMattei. Also during this first year of Linfield, I got one of those jobs at the PHONE-A-THON, calling alumni to "update their information" and beg for donations. I was going to call Amy Tan, and speak with her myself. Thankfully, for my sanity, I quit before that happened.

Amy began to dissolve as an enigma for me, she was just another celebrity, another writer of a book. The book was beautifully written and for obvious reasons made me homesick. It made me feel closer to my mother than ever, and I knew that, like the women in the book, I would have a special bond with her forever.

The sad thing is, after I finished the book, my love affair a la John Hinckley Jr. with Amy Tan ended, and I cannot bear to pick up any of her other books.

Another hilarious thing is I found this on Tan's website:
[http://www.amytan.net/MythsAndLegends...]
Please make special note of personal errata #2 and #9.
I rest my case. We were meant to be with each other.

After I read The Joy Luck Club (summer required reading before sophomore English in high school), I started pestering my mom about her abandoned children in mainland China. I also declared that I would name my two kids after the aforementioned abandoned children: Spring Flower and Spring Rain.

My mom laughed in my face about the latter, saying no self-respecting Chinese would give their kids such pedestrian names, and would be mock-pissed about the former.

The truth is that The Joy Luck Club got some things right and got a lot of other things dramatic. The stuff that rang the most true with me was the angsty rivalry between Waverly and June; particularly June's meltdown at the piano recital (a consistent paranoia of mine throughout childhood) and Waverly's accusations toward her mother (a fantasy of mine growing up).

I now realize that some of my issues with my mom were probably planted by reading The Joy Luck Club; others were valid insofar as they existed within the collective repressed thoughts of first-generation Asian-Americans forced to compete against the highest standards: their parents'.

I think The Joy Luck Club is important because it was prominent in the mainstream and it finally allowed ABCs (American-born Chinese) to recognize themselves in a major work of literature. The problem is that the book came out almost twenty years ago and there have been nearly no major additions to the genre. I hate for people to think JLC is definitive about our culture and experience, as influential as it is.