The Joy Luck Club is one of those books that everyone has heard of, everyone has added to their TBR under some sort of shelf name like “books i should read” and everyone glances over in favor of the latest release with hype.

I’m not judging you. I’m guilty of the same.

I picked up a pristine first edition of this at a local rummage sale last year and had the foresight to put in on top of my dresser, which serves as a sort of physical TBR reminding me of all the books I should read before going on another one-click binge on Amazon.

It’s interesting, how stress affects our lives. So many of my friends are turning to fluffy rom-coms to see them through the pandemic, and I get that. Rom-coms are escapism at its finest.

I tried reading one two days ago and just couldn’t.

For some strange reason, I’ve been drawn to grittier books instead. Thrillers. Grimdark. And now, The Joy Luck Club. Which is ironic because it literally has the word “Joy” in the title.

That’s not to say that this is some heavy, depressing read. There IS a lot of joy in this book. But there’s also a lot of hardship. This book centers on four Chinese women and their daughters. The mothers are immigrants, the children born in the US.

This was released in 1989 but is still so relevant today. And because of the lack of pop culture references in the daughters’ stories, it reads like it could have been written today.

I Googled this book after finishing it and was surprised to see there was so much backlash against it. People painted Amy Tan as being racist against her own culture and of denigrating Asian men because they were negatively portrayed in this book.

But they weren’t all portrayed negatively. Some of the male Asian characters were incredibly kind, strong, and steadfast. As a side note, white men were equally shitty, if not more so, and a lot of the women were just as problematic as the men. In short, they read like real people.

And that’s because the author based this book on her own mother’s stories.

Here’s the thing modern readers need to know before they write this off before reading it based on old, negative reviews or Reddit threads. This book is loosely biographical. Tan’s experiences are not going to be the experiences of every Asian American.

The Joy Luck Club had a huge burden to bear. It was an incredibly popular book about Asian Americans at a time when there was very little representation. The same goes for the movie.

Which put the onus of representing an entire people on ONE person. And more importantly, one woman of color.

Even today women of color are expected to go above and beyond and be absolutely perfect in every single way to get a seat at the table. Yes, we are making headway, and yes, a larger percentage of the population understands that WoC are just as fallible and varied and complex and flawed as everyone else, but there is still so. Much. Progress. To. Be. Made.

Is it any wonder that back in 1989 Amy Tan was made a pariah?

As I write this, Asian and Asian American representation is increasing. In the Young Adult fiction category especially, not to mention blockbuster movies like Crazy Rich Asians.

Reading The Joy Luck Club now will likely only be one of many stories about Asian Americans for readers instead of THE ONE.

Is this book flawless? Nope. Are there some legit criticisms to be made against it? You betcha. The same can be said for all books. I am not in any way shape or form saying that people are not allowed to criticize this. But, in a broader sense,

It’s time people forgive Amy Tan for not being perfect.

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Amy Tan's most famous novel, The Joy Luck Club, examines the relationships of four Chinese immigrant women with their American-born daughters. Key to these explorations are the tragic histories each woman carried into this country (and largely kept silent about), their desire to advance their heritage to the next generation, and the conflicting need to reveal their secrets so that these daughters may better understand themselves.

Central here, for example, is June Woo. Hers is the only absent mother, Suyuan having died a few months earlier of a brain aneurysm. June has taken her mother's "fourth corner" in the women's Mah Jong group and it is during this time that she discovers a letter has arrived; a letter her mother had been praying to receive for years. It seems two other daughters had been left (and lost) in China and were now writing to reveal themselves and plead for a visit from their mom. Yet Suyuan was no longer alive. What June should do about this, and how to do it, sends her diving into her grief and the memories she has of the mother she knew.

The histories of Suyuan and the other aunties are deeply dramatic and painful; filled with character-forging events and life-altering losses. Connections are crafted through the inclinations of their daughters - so much of each daughter's choice-making reflecting each mother's ancient agony. Tan set herself an ambitious task with this and succeeded overall, though I found certain transitions from family to family to be a little choppy. If you can identify all the players without a scorecard, you are a more diligent reader than I.

The movie, which I saw prior to reading the book, was marvelous and has long been a favorite of mine. Much easier was it there to follow the families and sink into the heart of the thing. It's not really one over the other...suffice to say the film is a gem.

The Joy Luck Club is the first Amy Tan novel that I read. I thought I should read one of her books before I start watching the Netflix documentary about her.

The Joy Luck Club is about four Chinese women, living in San Francisco, who meet often to play Mahjong, eat, and chat. It's also about their families, especially about their American born daughter.
Despite its Chinese fragrance, there are many aspects that are shared with most immigrant stories. There's the intergenerational conflict, with an added layer of complexity - kids born to immigrant parents, living and absorbing the culture of the country they were born in, while having the influences of their parents' native countries, which for the most part, especially when young, they reject or disdain.
Without a doubt, the mother-daughter relationships were quite fascinating. Tan pinpointed brilliantly how little kids know about their parents and their history.

The novel also made me realize how many people who have suffered greatly, somehow manage to keep on living, seemingly ordinary lives.

Be careful when you read this book, you'll find yourself feeling peckish, given there's a lot of talk about food, delicious, fragrant complex food.

During high school, when I did not have the life experience to fully appreciate her work, I read each of Amy Tan's books as they came out. Now, years later, with many other books and various experiences under my belt, I reread The Joy Luck Club, Tan's first book, as part of my March Women's History Month lineup.

Following her mother's death, June Mei Woo has replaced her mother Suyuan at her monthly mah jong game. Suyuan started this game and Joy Luck Club when she first immigrated to the United States as a way to maintain her Chinese culture in a new country. The other families who joined her-- the Hsus, Jongs, and St Claires-- became like family as together they celebrated festivals, children's birthdays, and indoctrinated the next generation in Chinese culture. Yet, June Mei and her friends from the group, Waverly, Rose, and Lena, for the most part were interested in achieving the American dream, often times at the expense of their mothers who worked hard to preserve their Chinese cultural existence.

It is also only at these meetings that these four ladies could pour out the sorrows of the life they left behind in China, including extended families who stayed in villages while these fortunate ones moved to Shanghai and Hong Kong and then to the United States. Away from these intimate gatherings, even the daughters of these women did not know much about their mothers' lives in China. It is at the opening of the book that June Mei finds out that her mother had twin daughters in China who she abandoned as babies and after all these years, they have been found. Much to June Mei's chagrin, the older women urge her to travel to China to meet her sisters and teach them about their mother's heritage.

While much about immigration experience, The Joy Luck Club is also about both the younger and older generation's path to self discovery. Tan uses a vignette format to alternate stories between the younger and older women, with June Mei's voice serving as a voice between the two. I enjoyed learning about life in pre-revolutionary, rural China and the hardships that drove the Chinese to immigrate in the first place. Once in the United States, however, the protagonists strove to preserve the same language, food, culture of the China that they were quick to leave behind. The fact that none of their daughters chose to marry Chinese men attests to the generation gap between first and second generation immigrants of any ethnic group. As in many cases, when the children move toward middle age, then they become interested in their parents' heritage, as is the case here. Unfortunately, it does change the gap that had been created when the children shunned their culture in exchange for life as normal Americans.

When published, The Joy Luck Club was an innovative look at Chinese immigrants and how being Chinese changes with each generation. Tan has encouraged an entire generation of Chinese American writers who we can enjoy today, and now there are a plethora of cultural groups writing about their immigrant experience. I recently read as part of a buddy read The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and many of the participants noted that Lahiri's writing is much like Tan's a generation later. Talking about how Indian culture changes from one generation to the next, Lahiri does seem much as Tan, the torch bearer for this style of writing. That the Joy Luck Club has been an on the same page selection in multiple cities as well as studied in schools speaks to its enduring qualities. I look forward to revisiting Tan's other books again, and rate The Joy Luck Club 4 bright stars.

It amazes me that The Joy Luck Club is almost 25 years old, yet I'm not sure why as it seems as though I've known about it for most of my life. It's just one of those books everyone seems to have heard of. Why I put off reading it for so long I can't say. Though this book didn't quite live up to my expectations, I'm glad I read it.

I think the main problem was that the book felt like it needed to be longer. There were eight central characters, four mothers and their four daughters, and with the chapters being somewhat short and the book being under 300 pages, there was not a lot of time for Tan to completely develop her characters. In fact, several of them merged into one uber-tragic-Chinese-female character in my brain, especially the mothers. It was hard to distinguish them and their back stories from each other.

I preferred the daughter chapters. The "Americanized" daughters and their Caucasian boyfriends and husbands and ex-husbands and their westernized failures and miseries and competitiveness. Their messy divorces and careers and therapists. They're not quite American and not quite Chinese. Tan captured the tension and misunderstandings between the mothers and daughters well. Being a daughter of immigrants myself, I found myself smiling and smirking quite often at this in-between world that only us first generationers can truly understand.

I really loved this book with its varied story lines-- each with a tender tale that told a different view of life in China and as American immigrants.

I actually preferred the mothers' story lines to the daughters' but maybe that's because the past stories explained so much more than the present story lines.

A lovely read.

( Reviewed 11/06/21)

3,5 estrellas.

Un melodrama familiar muy fácil de leer que nos cuenta la historia de 4 mujeres emigrantes chinas en EEUU y cuatro de sus hijas, y las desavenencias entre ellas, puesto que a las típicas diferencias generacionales y las dificultades en las relaciones maternofiliales, se le unen las diferencias culturales, pues las hijas se criaron en EEUU y son plenamente americanas.

Por lo tanto no es esta una novela sobre ser chino o de ascendencia china en América (si bien hay pinceladas de esto, pues es inevitable) sino una historia sobre la familia. Sobre madres e hijas y sus problemas de comunicación.

El libro se divide en cortos capítulos, cada uno centrado en uno de los personajes y todos ellos crean como una historia coral. Lo que ocurre es que a mí me ha parecido al final un poco deslavazado. No es realmente un problema, porque es agradable de leer y una lectura reconfortante que me ha venido bien al final de lecturas más densas, pero que tampoco se espere leer la Gran Novela aquí. Tampoco creo que la autora lo pretenda.

Lo dicho, un libro fácil de leer, que tanto lo puede leer alguien de 16 como una persona de 108 años, y que para quien le gusten las sagas familiares y las historias más pequeñas está muy bien.

This book had really good writing and interesting characters. I went into this thinking it was one big story and I was disappointed to find it was not. It was a bunch of short stories that interconnected sort of like Olive Kitteridge. I think I would have been more emotionally invested in it had it been one story where the characters could really grow into themselves. With that said, I am excited to try some of Tan's other books.

Why read The Joy Luck Club? Because sometimes one needs to get in touch with his inner Chinese feminine side.



Amy Tan's most famous book offered ample opportunity in that regard. The JLC is all about the relationships between Chinese moms and their daughters.

Honestly, I picked this up as part of my studies into Chinese culture. My brother has been teaching English over there for a few years now and I plan on visiting one day. As per usual, I like to read up on a place before the trip. Some people say that spoils the surprise, but I feel like I get more out of the visit that way. There always seems to be plenty of surprises when you travel to the other side of the world, regardless of the prep work.

Was this useful for Chinese studies? Not 100%. The stories herein, which are no doubt heavily indebted to Tan's personal experiences, are not only fictional, but they're also about the Chinese-American experience. A good deal of the book takes place in the U.S. There are many old world/home land stories and Tan does an excellent job including and describing Chinese customs and traditions. It's just that most of the time they are tainted or at least touched by the hand of the West.

The relationships themselves and how they play out is, for the most part, satisfying. Emotions sometimes run high and occasionally over. There are laughs to be had in everyday misunderstandings. The characters may be foreign to me, but were nevertheless utterly relatable. After all, most everyone has a parent-child relationship to relate to. My own relationship with my mother was, for better or worse, close. I may not be a woman or Chinese, but that hardly matters, as nothing was lost in Tan's translation of the mother-child bond.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is the story four Chinese immigrant families living in San Fransisco who start a club playing Mahjong and feasting on their favorite meals. Throughout these meetings, four mothers, four daughters, and four families stories are interwoven. The mothers and daughters are shown in contrast through most of the plot. The mothers want their daughters to be more Chinese, while the daughters wish their mothers would be more interested in their American lives, and their new ways of living, which are often in conflict with the old ways their mothers know. All in all, I really enjoyed The Joy Luck Club I was moved by many of the stories, and felt attached to many characters by the end. Four stars.

There was a recent PBS "American Masters" documentary about Tan. In it, we get the story of what was behind her writing, not only the Chinese-American culture she grew up in, but a rather horrendous long-time conflict she had with her suicidal mother. Her mother even attempted to kill Amy with a meat cleaver, then was going to kill herself after that. Fortunately, Amy's pleas stopped her. This was the central drama of Amy's life and it's reflected throughout her writing. I think this element is likely why, as a male, I never fully connected to her stories.

Tan was working constantly as a technical writer, hours a week, creating huge manuals for Microsoft and other tech companies. She started writing fiction as a kind of therapy, an emotional outlet. She happened to go to a writer's conference in Squaw Valley and a random circumstance gave her extra time with one of the experts there who read her work and gave her life-changing advice on how to improve. I think Tan had some natural writing talent that had to be applied more effectively.

Here's the link to the documentary...

https://www.netflix.com/title/81436586

OVERVIEW
when i was younger, my japanese mother told me to read this book. at that time, it hadn’t occurred to me that this was the one thing my mother loved with her whole heart that was chinese — but she loved this book, and even watched the movie with me, so i knew it was time to read it.


i got around to reading it during the last few days of 2023. from amy tan’s foreword, i instantly understood the power of the novel — the recollections of this woman who had taken stories from her chinese-born mother, where she had listened and wrote everything down, much like i do with my mother’s stories reminiscing about an older time. it made me understand her story even from the first few pages, and the authenticity of tan’s voice warned me that it was about to get really real.


the novel follows four american-born chinese (ABC) women and their mothers, portraying the love, family, friendship and differences that create friction between our loved ones and drive us further away, and towards, one another.


i have realized, through this book, that my childhood was shared by others like me, people across the country who understand what it was like to both want to be and want not to be, to battle constantly between two things.


THE ASIAN MOTHER
i felt deeply inspired by the accounts of each chinese mother as they shared their stories across time and across asia traveling to the west, each of them in their own way difficult and painful, equally lovely and horrifying.


through the perspective of the chinese mother, we explore the pros and cons of raising an american child: the child is left contemplating their chinese conscious and their american conscious. the child thus has the power to remove parts of them that should, or shouldn’t, be removed.


we explore our chinese mothers’ worries throughout the text: was it a mistake to bring a daughter here? does she now not understand what it means to be chinese? has she lost something? has she gained something? something unwanted?


i liked that there was so much exploration of the asian mother-daughter relationship, the complexity of it, the confusion, the hatred, the joy; it showed such an accurate look inside what it means to grow up as an asian american woman. that you are american, but it’s also a lie. that you are asian but only inside, where no one can see.


the joy luck club portrays in the four chinese-american daughters, and maybe in all asian americans of our time, the strong beliefs that are growing inside us, but that are halted constantly by the asian mother’s voice — the pulsating, defeaning, loving, intrusive voice — the voice that tries to convey love but doesn’t know how. the voice that feels like it is holding you back instead of pushing you forward. the voice that is and isn’t, you. the voice you don’t know yourself without.


this was the most understood i have ever felt not only as an asian american reader, but as a first generation japanese american with a japanese born mother. it’s the closest i have ever felt a writer come in their effort to reach me, to tell me about my own upbringing, to tell me that they understood.


CRITICISMS?
one thing i would have liked to see is tan’s exploration of the different voices of the asian woman; many times, the characters’ voices blended together and it wasn’t clear who was speaking. i think spending more time inside the characters and developing their personalities would have helped distinguish their voices and made them more appealing and intriguing. this is my only criticism of the novel.


AMERICAN CONSCIOUS; ASIAN CONSCIOUS
unlike my mother, i grew up reading contemporary asian american literature and got multiple perspectives on not only the asian experience in america, but also on that weird, uncomfortable space one writes from when caught between the asian and asian american.


i read fiction books like Pachinko (1/5 stars), autofiction like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (3/5 stars), and now, The Joy Luck Club (5/5 stars) — and instead of seeing the differences my mother saw with her Asian-born eyes, instead of duplicating her desire to distinguish ourselves from the rest, i saw only our similarities.


i grew up hearing my mother talk about how different china and japan were. from growing up in the states and also inside my mother’s head, i realized i could hear more if i just lifted my american head — i could see how the ideas she sometimes had about china were due to her being too deeply engrained inside her japanese identity, that it was partly because she failed to realize that, somewhere, she had china inside her too. that at the end of the day, they were our people and we were theirs.


inside my closest chinese friends, and inside myself too, i could see that what most of us really wanted was simply to understand each other. we have stepped shyly towards the newness of each other’s cultures, instead of away into the confines of our safe, individual worlds. we have reveled in our ability to read snippets of each others’ writing systems, we have eaten at both chinese and japanese restaurants, talked about the same show in different cultural adaptions, learned the difference in the meanings between “本当上手” in both languages, spent hours exchanging tidbits of history, gossiped about regional tendencies on who was likelier to be petty or to rip you off, tutored each other in chinese and japanese language courses.


every day we would learn a new word, how to say we were cold, how to say ‘good morning’ and to call each other ‘sweetheart’, and how to insult each other in the language that wasn’t ours — and all of this, all of this is part of me, even if i can’t call it my own.


and so i imagine, from the chinese mother’s perspective in the joy luck club, maybe from the thoughts that must have crossed my mother’s mind when she decided to start a family in america — i imagine our mothers assume that, by being born here, we have lost something.


i disagree. i think we have managed to keep what is ours, while adding also an awareness of others around us that our parents didn’t have: a desire to learn about what isn’t ourselves, to build an appreciation for what is difficult and uncertain, to what is new.


i can’t imagine that my mother’s generation had as much privilege as we do, the novelty and joy in cultural exchange. all of these tiny, beautiful details neither side would have known had we not opened ourselves, and been open, to the fact that we are both different and the same.


so, there is goodness in being asian, there is goodness in being american, and there is goodness in being both — but there is no goodness in remaining one thing, and refusing to learn about the confines that exceed our own bodies. the things that have nothing to do with us have everything to do with us; and i believe that as human beings, we have a responsibility to all of it.


BONUS
one storytelling cultural crossover i found in ocean vuong’s vietnamese-american novel and amy tan’s asian american novel:


A child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard – little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child.

To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched – and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Vuong, 21)


and a snippet from the joy luck club:

But I often heard stories of a ghost who tried to take children away, especially strong-willed little girls who were disobedient. Many times Popo said aloud to all who could hear that my brother and I had fallen out of the bowels of a stupid goose, two eggs that nobody wanted, not even good enough to crack over the rice porridge. She also said this so that the ghosts would not steal us away. So you see, to Popo we were also very precious.

The Joy Luck Club (Tan, 33)



in some ways, we are still divided by our history; i still meet chinese-born people that dislike japanese people, and vice versa. i understand that to release history and to forgive is difficult. i spent many months working at a japanese supermarket this past summer, with the intention of gaining the experience working in a japanese company and using proper polite forms of speech.


what i hadn’t expected was to meet an old chinese man who worked as an exterminator. we would talk and ask each other questions, as we were often the last ones in the store.


i once asked him what he thought of japanese people, because i knew that while chinese friends my age were more open to us and less grudging about the past, an older person entrenched in history and knowledge and pride for their country might not be.


what he said surprised me — he said that he had come to america ages ago, and had brought his entire family with him. he knew our history well, and had his own opinion on it, but he told me that he understood, that he understood anger on both sides, understood why people held on to it. but it was in the past, and all the killing and war and hard feelings should be put aside, that japan and china had better things to do like become stronger, to help each other, to forgive.


thankfully, after each generation, we become more curious about one another, kinder, more receptive to our own differences. we were taught to remember our history, that to remember means to honor, and that we must repeat it by living it over and over again so we always remember the skin we cut open for our countries, in order to remain alive. we were taught that we have to remember pain, so that we prevent it from ever happening again.


i think that to remember scars is crucial, because who we were then is still part of us. but the past will keep getting farther away the more we open ourselves to each other.

my new blog

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lovely and horrifying, like a mirror


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