The Joy Luck Club

Front cover of a first edition of The Joy Luck Club.

The Joy Luck Club (ISBN 0399134204) is a novel by the American author Amy Tan. It was first published in 1989. It is the first of six novels written by Tan.

The Joy Luck Club of the book's title is a mahjong club founded in San Francisco by four Chinese immigrant women. The main characters in the novel are those four Chinese women (Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong and Ying-Ying St. Clair) and their four American-born daughters (Jing-Mei "June" Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong and Lena St. Clair). The novel is divided into four parts and each part is further divided into four chapters. The first part, Feathers from a Thousand Li Away, is mostly told from the point of view of the older Chinese women and is mostly concerned with their childhood experiences. The second part, Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, is about the childhood experiences of their four daughters and is told from the point of view of those four young Chinese-American women. The third part, American Translation, is also told from the point of view of those four young women and is about their experiences as adults. The fourth part, Queen Mother of the Western Skies, in common with the first part, is mostly told from the point of view of the older Chinese women and is mostly concerned with their experiences as young adults. The first and final chapters of The Joy Luck Club are both narrated by Jing-Mei Woo and deal with events following the death of her mother, Suyuan Woo. In the first chapter, Jing-Mei finds out from the other members of the Joy Luck Club that her two long lost half-sisters, twins that her mother was forced to abandon, have been found. In the final chapter, Jing-Mei travels to China for the first time and meets her half-sisters.

Some of the chapters of The Joy Luck Club are reworkings of short stories by Amy Tan that had previously been published in The Atlantic, Grazia, Ladies' Home Journal, San Francisco Focus, Seventeen and The Short Story Review. All of the book's chapters can be read and appreciated as stand-alone short stories, although reading them together creates a better insight into the lives and personalities of the eight main female characters.

Although the novel received largely positive reviews on its publication, it was also criticized for inventing a false Chinese mythology, depicting Chinese culture as cruel and misogynistic and perpetuating stereotypes about Asians, especially Asian men. Readers should be aware that the novel references suicide, sexual assault, toxic relationships, child abandonment, infant mortality and accidental death in childhood.

The Joy Luck Club was adapted as an American film of the same name that was released in 1993.

Summary

Feathers from a Thousand Li Away

The novel opens with a vignette about a Chinese woman arriving in the United States clutching a live swan. She bought the swan at a market in China where the vendor told her that it used to be a duck. He said it stretched its neck to try to become a goose but became a beautiful swan instead. Therefore. to the woman, the bird represents striving for a better life and achieving one that surpasses expectations. The woman hopes to give the swan to her unborn daughter who will be able to have a better life than the woman can imagine in America. The swan is confiscated from the woman by customs officials but she is able to keep one of its feathers. She intends to keep it and present it to her daughter when she is able to explain its significance in perfect American English.

The first chapter of the novel proper opens after the death of Suyuan Woo, a Chinese immigrant woman who lived in San Francisco.

In 1930s China, Suyuan is the wife of an officer in the Chinese Nationalist army. After the Japanese invade, and while her husband is away fighting, Suyuan suggests to some of her friends that they form a small club. They get together once a week, wear their best clothes, eat the finest food they can, play mahjong and generally behave as if there is not a war going on and thus temporarily forget their troubles. They call their club the Joy Luck Club.

The situation worsens for Suyuan. She has to leave her home to flee from the advancing Japanese army. Weak and sick from dysentery, Suyuan gradually abandons all of her possessions when she is no longer able to carry them. She even has to abandon her twin infant daughters and trusts that someone else will look after them. Suyuan is rescued but finds out that her husband has been killed.

A set of mahjong tiles.

Suyuan later marries a man named Canning Woo. They move to the United States where their daughter Jing-Mei is born. Through the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco, Suyuan meets and befriends three other Chinese immigrant women, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong and Ying-Ying St. Clair. They form a new Joy Luck Club modeled on the one Suyuan had founded in China. Both Suyuan's second husband and her American-born daughter are aware of the twin girls she was forced to leave behind. Canning Woo tries to help his wife locate the missing girls but comes to believe she has given up hope of finding them. Shortly before Suyuan dies, however, word reaches the Joy Luck Club that the now adult twins have been found. Following Suyuan's death, Jing-Mei, who had gone by the name June earlier in her life, is asked to take her mother's place in the Joy Luck Club and to travel to China to meet her two half-sisters.

The remaining three chapters of the first section of the novel are about childhood experiences of the other three members of the Joy Luck Club.

An-Mei Hsu is raised by her maternal grandmother after her mother leaves home to be the third concubine of Wu Tsing, a wealthy middle-aged man. Since she is considered to have brought shame on her family, An-Mei is forbidden from ever talking about her mother by her grandmother, uncles and aunts. An-Mei's mother is not even allowed to see her when she almost dies as a result of being accidentally scalded. She does, however, return home again to show her deep love for her own mother, An-Mei's grandmother, when she becomes seriously ill. In an attempt to save the old woman's life, her daughter cuts off some of her own flesh and cooks it in a special soup for her. The soup fails to prevent the old woman's death.

Lindo Jong is promised in marriage to a wealthy family while she is still a child. Her birth parents become distant towards her after that, feeling that she no longer belongs to them. As a teenager, Lindo leaves home to marry her promised husband, Huang Tyuan-yu. Huang Tyuan-yu is just a boy himself and has no sexual interest in Lindo, initially not even allowing her to share his bed. Lindo's mother-in-law, however, blames her and scolds her for not fulfilling her wifely duties and failing to produce grandchildren. Although Lindo comes to love her husband as a brother, she remains deeply unhappy in the Huang household and comes up with a clever plan to escape while retaining her honor. She tells her mother-in-law that she had a dream in which one of the Huangs' ancestors revealed she was not Tyuan-yu's true wife and her continued presence in the house would only bring misfortune on the family. Tyuan-yu's true wife, although a servant, is of royal blood and is already pregnant with his "spiritual child". In truth, one of the servants had become pregnant and been abandoned by her lover. The story works. Lindo is allowed to leave and goes to the United States. Tyuan-yu marries the servant, who is happy to have her child legitimized and have the chance of a better life.

The Chinese moon goddess Chang'e.

Ying-Ying St. Clair is born into a very wealthy family. One Mid-Autumn Festival, she is given new clothes, told she will see the Moon Lady who can grant wishes, is taken on board a large boat on a large lake and told there will be a feast there that evening. Ying-Ying gets her new clothes dirty. She is told to take them off and is not allowed to participate in the evening's festivities. While nobody is looking, Ying-Ying falls overboard. She is recued by a fishing boat. Since she is dirty and is only wearing underwear, the fishermen believe her to be a beggar. Nevertheless, they agree to look for the large boat on which she says her family is having a party. When they approach what Ying-Ying thinks is the right boat, she sees another family with another little girl on board. The fishermen decide to leave Ying-Ying on the shore. They reason that, if she really is from a wealthy family, her parents will look for her and eventually find her. An outdoor performance begins. The spectators are told that they will see the Moon Lady who will grant their wishes. Ying-Ying is entranced by the performance. When it ends, she approaches the Moon Lady and says she wishes to be reunited with her family. The Moon Lady does not talk to Ying-Ying and is revealed not to be a magical being but just a man in drag when he starts to remove his costume. Ying-Ying is eventually found by her family many hours later.

Twenty-Six Malignant Gates

The second part of the novel opens with a vignette about a Chinese mother arguing with her young American-born daughter. The mother claims to have a book called The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates that shows all the terrible fates can behalf careless and disobedient children. The daughter does not believe the book exists and demands to be shown it.

The four chapters of the second part of the novel focus on childhood experiences of Waverly Jong, Lena St. Clair, Rose Hsu Jordan and Jing-Mei Woo, the daughters of the Joy Luck Club members Lindo Jong, Ying-Ying St. Clair, An-Mei Hsu and Suyuan Woo.

Sign for Waverly Place in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Waverly Place Jong is named after the street Waverly Place in San Francisco on which she is born and grows up. At a Christmas party held at the First Chinese Baptist Church, one of Waverly's brothers is given a second hand chess set with some pieces missing. Although the children's mother considers the present to be junk and wants to throw it away, Waverly and her two brothers want to learn how to play the game. Waverly soon becomes very good at it. She further develops her skills by playing chess with old men in the nearby park. By the age of 9, she is a national chess champion. Waverly grows tired of what she sees as her mother's constant boasting about her, displaying her like a trophy and attempting to take credit for her achievements. After an angry confrontation with her mother in public, Waverly stops playing chess. To her surprise, her mother does not try to make her play again. When Waverly does choose to start playing chess again, she is unable to regain her former level of success.

Lena St. Clair's father, Clifford St. Clair, is a white American of British and Irish descent. Many people are unaware of Lena St. Clair's Chinese heritage because of her name and her appearance. On one occasion, her Chinese mother is mistaken for her maid. Lena considers her mother to have been a "living ghost" ever since she had a child that died at birth.

Rose Hsu Jordan is planning to divorce her husband Ted. She is not looking forward to breaking the news to her mother. Contemplating her difficult relationship with her mother leads Rose to recall a traumatic incident from her childhood.

On a trip to the beach, Rose's youngest brother, 4-year-old Bing, falls off a seawall. The other members of the family search for him in vain. To her surprise and relief, the other members of Rose's family do not blame her for the loss of Bing, even though she was supposed to be watching him at the time. Rose and her mother An-Mei return to the beach alone the following day. An-Mei is at first optimistic that God will return her son to her alive. Eventually, An-Mei and Rose give up the search as hopeless. Bing is presumed drowned. His body is never recovered. An-Mei loses her faith after the death of her son. She records Bing's death in her family Bible. She then uses that Bible to prop up a faulty table leg and never moves it again.

Suyuan Woo is certain that her daughter Jing-Mei s a child prodigy, just like the chess champion Waverly Jong. Unfortunately, she does not know in which area her daughter's prodigious talents lie and makes her try out various activities, in none of which she excels. Suyuan eventually decides that Jing-Mei is a child prodigy pianist and arranges for her to have lessons with an old and profoundly deaf piano teacher. After one disastrous performance at a children's talent show, Jing-Mei never plays the piano again. For her 30th birthday, however, Jing-Mei's mother gives her the piano that she used to play as a child. Suyuan tells her daughter that she still believes she has the potential to be a great pianist and urges her to try again.

American Translation

The third part of the novel deals with Lena St. Clair, Waverly Jong, Rose Hsu Jordan and Jing-Mei Woo as adult women who are all facing problems of some kind.

Lena St. Clair gradually realizes that her husband Harold Livotny is taking advantage of her at home and at work, where he is her superior and earns much more than she does. Her mother, Ying-Ying, helps her to see this and encourages her to stand up for herself.

Waverly Jong is divorced from her husband, Marvin Chen, and has one daughter, Shosana. Waverly is in a serious relationship with Rich Schields, a white American man. The two plan to get married. Waverly plans to tell her mother this at a family dinner party to which both she and Rich are invited. She is worried that her mother still dominates her and will not approve of the marriage, as she did not approve of the first one. Waverly does not have the courage to tell her mother she wants to marry Rich. She also feels that the dinner party was a disaster, although Rich, unaware of subtle cultural signals, thinks it went well. When Waverly confronts her mother the following day, she finds out that her mother already knows about her marriage plans and fully approves.

Rose Hsu Jordan finds out that her husband Ted wants to divorce her and marry someone else. With her mother's help, Rose learns to be stronger and to force Ted to take her more seriously. Although she accepts the divorce, she does not accept the conditions in the divorce papers Ted wans her to sign. She hires a good lawyer who makes sure she gets to keep her beloved house.

At a Chinese New Year dinner party at the home of her mother, Suyuan Woo, Jing-Mei Woo has an argument with Waverly Jong. Jing-Mei is worried that her mother still unfavorably compares her to Waverly and considers her to be a failure because she did not graduate college and is not married. Suyuan gives her daughter a jade pendant that she calls her "life's importance". She tells Jing-Mei that she is proud of her and, in spite of all of her success, Waverly does not have Jing-Mei's kind and generous heart.

Queen Mother of the Western Skies

Xi Wangmu, Queen Mother of the Western Skies.

The final part of the novel opens with a vignette about an old Chinese woman who realizes that her infant granddaughter laughs for seemingly no reason because she is an incarnation of the goddess Xi Wangmu, the Queen Mother of the Western Skies. Having already lived several lifetimes, she has learned not to give up hope. The old woman asks the child to impart her wisdom.

The first three chapters of the novel's final part are about episodes earlier in the lives of An-Mei Hsu, Ying-Ying St. Clair and Lindo Jong.

After her grandmother's funeral, and against the wishes of the rest of her family, An-Mei leaves with her mother. An-Mei's mother is the third concubine (or fourth wife) of the wealthy middle-aged Wu Tsing, who has just taken a fifth wife. For a while, An-Mei is very happy in her luxurious new home. Then Second Wife returns from her vacation. Second Wife is the true ruler of the household. She tries to win over An-Mei by giving her a pearl necklace. An-Mei's mother shows her that the pearls are fakes made of glass. It is Second Wife who chose all of Wu Tsing's subsequent concubines. She tricked An-Mei's widowed mother into being raped by Wu Tsing, thus forcing her to either become his concubine or face further disgrace. Second Wife has taken Fourth Wife's son, An-Mei's half-brother, as her own. When she has feared losing favor with Wu Tsing, Second Wife has made fake suicide attempts by swallowing small amounts of opium. An-Mei's mother commits suicide by swallowing opium two day's before Chinese New Year. Others in the household think that she was trying to copy Second Wife and make a fake suicide attempt. An-Mei, however, knows that she really intended to kill herself because of when she did it. It is the time of year when all debts must be honored, something that the superstitious Wu Tsing takes very seriously. Out of fear of what his Fourth Wife's ghost might otherwise do, Wu Tsing promises to honor Fourth Wife in death as if she had been his first and only wife. He also promises to show favor to her son and raise An-Mei as his own daughter. An-Mei crushes the fake pearl necklace Second Wife gave her to show she has lost her power over the household.

Unknown to her daughter Lena, who thinks she was a poor village girl, Ying-Ying comes from a very wealthy background. She is married to a man in China, whom she refuses to name, who is a serial womanizer. Ying-Ying runs away and gets a job as a shop assistant. It is in the shop that Ying-Ying meets the American Clifford St. Clair. She allows him to court her although she never really loves him and is secretly unimpressed with the gifts he gives her, considering them to be mere trinkets compared to the luxuries with which she grew up. In 1946, Ying-Ying finds out that her first husband has died, agrees to marry Clifford St. Clair and goes with him to the United States. Ying-Ying feels that she has had no control over her own life for years. It is only when she encourages Lena to leave her domineering husband Harold that Ying-Ying feels she is finally regaining some control.

Some fortune cookies.

On arrival in San Francisco, Lindo gets a job in a fortune cookie factory. It is there that she meets An-Mei Hsu. Lindo had never seen a fortune cookie before coming to the United States and An-Mei has to explain the concept to her. Since Lindo does not understand much English at first, An-Mei reads and translates the mottos inside the cookies to her. As Lindo's English improves, both she and An-Mei continue to find the fortunes inside the cookies highly amusing. The two women come up with a plan to get Lindo's boyfriend to ask her to marry him by giving him a fortune cookie in which they have placed the motto, "A house is not a home if a spouse is not at home." Although he has to look up the word "spouse" in his dictionary, Lindo's boyfriend proposes the following day.

The final chapter of the novel is about the adult Jing-Mei Woo's first visit to China, accompanied by her father. It ends with her meeting her half-sisters for the first time.

The other members of the Joy Luck Club had wanted Jing-Mei to break the news of their mother's death to her twin half-sisters in person. They do, however, realize that Jing-Mei is right when she says that it would be wrong to let the women expect to meet their mother only to disappoint them. They write a letter to the women informing them of Suyuan's death.

In China, Jing-Mei meets some of her father's relatives. He tells her what he knows of the twin's lives.

Suyuan left the twin baby girls with some money and a note she wrote on the back of a photograph of herself and her husband. The note stated the girls' names and asked whoever found them to look after them. The girls were found by cave-dwelling Muslim farmers who could not read or write. It was several months later that someone was able to read the note to them, by which time they had renamed the girls. Thanks to the photograph and the note on the back of it, the twins grew up knowing who their birth parents had been and honoring their original father and mother. Shortly before Suyuan's death, one of her old friends in China saw two identical looking women. She called out to them by the names Suyuan gave her twins, names that they eventually recognized as being their original ones.

On meeting Jing-Mei for the first time, her twin half-sisters call her mei-mei ("little sister") and remark on how much she has grown.

Film adaptation

The Joy Luck Club was adapted as an American film of the same name that was released in 1993. The film stars Tsai Chin as Lindo, Tamlyn Tomita as Waverly, France Nuyen as Ying-Ying, Lauren Tom as Lena, Lisa Lu as An-Mei, Rosalind Chao as Rose, Kieu Chinh as Suyuan and Ming-Na Wen as Suyuan's daughter June. It was directed by Wayne Wang. The screenplay was co-written by Amy Tan and Ronald Bass. The adaptation is a largely faithful one and is certainly true to the spirit of the novel. Most of the stories from the novel are included in the film, although the order in which they are told is rearranged. A framing device is added of a leaving party for June, held just before she travels to China, that prompts her and the other characters to think about their pasts. One significant change is that Suyuan's twin daughters are not informed by letter of their mother's death and still expect to meet her. It is left to June to break the sad news to them when she travels alone to China to meet them.

The film was a moderate box office success. Having been made on a budget of US$10.5 million, it earned US$32.9 million in the United States. In 2020, The Joy Luck Club was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the US National Film Registry.

Chinese-Amerian actress Ming-Na Wen who plays June in the film.

In common with the novel, the film received largely positive reviews upon its release. Similarly to the novel, it was, however, also criticized for depicting Asian men as being misogynistic and cruel. Interestingly, Lena's domineering husband Harold, who is a white American in the book, is an Asian-American in the film.

The Joy Luck Club was the first mainstream Hollywood movie to have a predominantly Asian cast and to focus on contemporary Asian-American issues since Flower Drum Song in 1961 and would be the last until Crazy Rich Asians in 2018. Its success sparked a brief interest in Asian topics among the major American studios. Amy Tan was approached by The Walt Disney Company with a view to bringing her second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, to the screen. Those negotiations ultimately fell through.

Screenwriter Ronald Bass has expressed an interest in making a sequel to The Joy Luck Club, either as a film or a television series. The sequel would take place twenty-five years after the end of The Joy Luck Club and would feature the same main cast. It would deal with the relationships between three generations of Chinese-American women with the four daughters from the original film all having adult daughters of their own.

External links

• The Joy Luck Club on GoodReads.