Primera novela de la autora y periodista Amy Tan, se convirtió en un éxito de ventas y fue llevada al cine a principios de los 90.
El libro refleja la brecha cultural que separa a los hijos nacidos en Estados Unidos de padres inmigrantes chinos. Particularmente, de las complicadas relaciones entre un grupo de cuatro mujeres y sus respectivas hijas que viven en San Francisco.
Su peculiar estructura está dividida en 16 historias interconectadas (algunas referidas a la niñez y juventud de las madres en China y otras a las historias de sus hijas en San Francisco). Lo que más me ha gustado del libro, con diferencia, son las historias de las madres, de las arcaicas tradiciones Chinas y del papel al que estaban relegadas las mujeres. Sin embargo, las historias personales de las hijas me dejaron bastante frío. Es por tanto una novela muy irregular.
Una de las premisas del libro que más me conmovió es lo poco que conocen esas hijas a sus madres, cómo la barrera cultural y del lenguaje no solo afecta a estas inmigrantes en el plano social, laboral etc, sino también en la intimidad del hogar y de la vida familiar, con hijos que se avergüenzan de sus costumbres, de sus supersticiones, de su nivel de inglés y hasta de su gusto por la ropa. Una pena (aunque tan real como la vida misma).

RESEÑA COMPLETA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF7In...

The Joy Luck Club wasn’t really what I was expecting. It was fine, I’m sure some find it deep and impactful, but it’s not one I’ll be thrusting into your hands or re-reading myself. In fact, I think reading the opening chapter as a short story by itself would make it much more powerful, so maybe give that a go instead.

My full review of The Joy Luck Club appeared first on Keeping Up With The Penguins.

Review on the way.....

This book has a lot of heart, and contains complex relationships of mothers and daughters as they attempt to understand and reconcile their cultural differences. It fell a bit flat because there was a lack distinction between the characters' voices. It felt much more like a collection of inter-connected short stories than a true novel because of the non-linear nature of the plot, the number of characters that had narrative perspectives, and the feeling that the plot lacked direction.

I thought this was poorly written. I could not keep track of who was who. I never really figured out why this book was written. I felt like several short stories put together with a very loose string.

I just love it when I start a book with no expectations and end up loving it. Which is rare, since I usually do have expectations. It was the mother-daughter thing that got me interested, but I ended up loving it for so many reasons: Tan's style and talent as a story teller, the symmetry (everything is based on no. 4 - the number of players in the Mahjong game; everything starts and ends with the east), the pre-communist China, the mothers - trying to make it in the USA and give their children the best opportunities but still holding on to their Chinese heritage and being the Tiger moms we know; the daughters - their American love interests, divorces, failures and resentment of everything their mothers say and do.

A series of short stories from four families of Chinese immigrants in America, apparently disconnected, but structured like a Mahjong game. Pivoted around mother daughter relation, having multiple layers dipped in Chinese culture, it was a joyful ride.

Some things I gathered about Chinese culture:
1. Usage of red eggs for auspicious occasions.
2. Extreme importance given to tiny feet in their definition of beauty.
3. Food habits - taking huge portions at first go is considered rude; demanding repeated portions is polite and hints the cook how much you appreciate their dish; leaving uneaten rice in the bowl is bad omen; cooking crabs with broken limbs is bad omen..... and many such interesting details.

Some quotes:
"I took this baby from my womb, before it could be born. This was not a bad thing to do in China back then, to kill a baby before it is born."

"I smile. I use my American face. That's the face Americans think is Chinese, the one they cannot understand. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother and she is not proud of me."

Though, had much difficulty initially to relate to the names and figure out who was who. It was only after 50% that I started seeing the connections. And by the time I reached the last story and realized the full circle, wanted to read it over again (I will someday!)

Recommended for cross cultural references.

I took an Asian History class in college and loved it. The Chinese culture has a way of drawing you in. Or maybe it wasn’t really Chinese culture; I wouldn’t know — maybe I can only see my American perception of Chinese culture.

Whatever it was — culture or only a facsimile of it — reading The Joy Luck Club drew me in almost instantly. The book is written with prose and descriptions fitting of the characters — beautiful and lyrical but with hidden sorrows and bitterness. The plot (was there really a plot per se?) was interwoven with stories of Chinese mothers and American daughters, struggling to bridge not just a generation gap but a cultural divide, as well.

It was hard to read this book and not try to glean a “bigger picture,” hunting for a “moral” to the story. I felt, sometimes, as though each story in the book was a puzzle piece, and — if I just move a few things around — things will fall neatly in to place. But I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe I’m missing something — or maybe the whole point of this book is to not quite be able to turn it around into a trite cliche.

Maybe I’m thinking too hard and should just say “I enjoyed the book.” ;-)

3.5 stars, though at first felt more like 3.

This story's bookends is: in late 1980s San Francisco, Jing-Mei 'June' Woo, after her mother's recent death, is asked to be one corner of a mah jong table for the regular meeting of the Joy Luck Club, formed by four Chinese immigrant women in 1949, modeled after her mother's previous one in WWII China, which was formed to get a break from harsh realities of the time. They play mah jong, eat good food, and gossip; the past history of their lives also pops up now and then in conversation. June then finds out that part of her mother's past has reached out to connect to her...

We get to her stories of two generations, four mothers, four daughters. Of mother/daughter relationship difficulties, cultural and generational differences. Of losses of things and people (each family has lost a child or two, to death or history, not always permanently as we learn), and marriages. Some mothers are already widows, or have married more than once, and some of the women here have married white men (Lena is asian/white daughter, and some of the present or future grandchildren are also mixed).

The mothers have grown in tumultuous times, coming to America in the late 1940s. June's mother lost her family and possessions running from the Japanese, including her girl twins we'll meet later , Lindo cleverly escapes an unsatisfying marriage, An-Mei suffers come from her mother's miserable life as the fourth wife to rich man with spiteful other wives, and Ying-Ying remembers her early trauma of getting lost as a little child, bad first marriage and the death of her first child, which have played their part in making her so superstitious and always scared for appearance of bad signs. Here I also mention that in their parents' sometimes some seem to have foot-binding - easy to get because that's what was done still back then.

For the daughters, there is different set of struggles: hard to understand their mothers' past, beliefs, and truths; the weight of expectations to be excellent in some subject like chess or playing piano, or how to deal with any success/failures; crumbling marriages and doubts about new ones; how to balance Chinese/American culture and self; how to feel about their mother's skills of English, or forgetting the Chinese; or just how much embarrassment about the Chinese things one feels, how much American things one wants to adapt. And for mixed daughters, there's also the matter of how the look, white, Asian.

When mothers look towards their daughters right-now, I think this is what they'd want: to be heard and seen, to be taken seriously, to have any promises kept seriously, to understand the bad and good luck beliefs on things like house object arrangements, that their daughters could have some pride in their Chinese heritage and not just look towards American culture all the time - I think a good long talk could benefit both of them: to know more, to have things explained, both sides honest.

Besides the bookends I mentioned above, the book's arrangement of POVs is good, though you might want to look regularly on who's who in the first pages. The second bookend, chapter-arrangemet-wise is that the mothers minus June's get the first and last, the daughters are in the middle.
(I'd like to note that since time has passed much on from this book, I think all three remaining mothers may be dead - Ying-Ying, for example, was born in 1914 - and the remaining husbands too, partly at least as they're smokers. The daughters and their siblings may have grandchildren now (thinking here about Waverley's daugher Shoshana, and other children not mentioned/existing yet, in the book). Is the Joy Luck Club still going in the new generation?)

At first I felt a bit whelmed about the book - story from this side, story from that side - but somewhere after the middleish I started to warm up to the book more. It became easier to understad these people, their failures/successes and their histories. A clear picture of two generations and their differences emerges, with nice details. And it's a rather beautiful one.

Review will be posted soon..

Rating - The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, 4 Sweets and the rich culture and beliefs of Chinese-American family. (A fast paced book and it was divided into short stories and lives of the characters. Recommended to everyone to those people who have no time to read. Simple and creative, a mixed Chinese-American culture book.)

Challenges:
Book #3 for 2011
Book #3 for Off The Shelf!
Shelfari - Flips Flipping Pages, February 2011 Discussion

5 when I read it on the 90s as a teenager. 4 maybe, if I read it today.

4,5. ¿Por qué he tardado tantos años en leer este libro?