1052 Tennyson, Lord Alfred
reGret in The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club is a novel filled with regrets.
Each character suffers from the loss of loved ones,
from hurts inflicted by family members, or from
bad choices she made herself. It would be easy to
imagine Suyuan Woo, the woman who forms two
Joy Luck clubs, one in World War II China and
one in postwar America, to be the character most
tormented by regrets, for she is forced to abandon
infant twin daughters while fleeing the Japanese
invasion of China. Suyuan thus lives her entire life
not knowing where her daughters are or if they are
still alive. However, her daughter, Jing-mei ( June),
says as she tells her mother’s story that Suyuan
“never looked back with regret.”
Throughout the novel, the other three moth-
ers of the Joy Luck Club, all Chinese immigrants,
regret that even though they work hard to give
their daughters more options in America than they
themselves had in China, the daughters still make
bad choices, still let friends and family members
hurt, abuse, and take advantage of them. An-mei
Hsu says, for example, that she was raised to think
only of other people’s needs, and she regrets that
even though she taught her daughter “the opposite,”
Rose also lives her life this way. In some way, each of
the four Joy Luck daughters is also remorseful about
the course of her life. Jing-mei rues that she is a col-
lege dropout and that her life as a business writer is
so ordinary. Waverly Jong deplores her inability to
stand up to her mother’s criticisms. Lena St. Clair is
bitter over her bad marriage, and Rose Hsu Jordan
lives in such fear of making a choice she will regret
later that she is unable to make any choice at all,
even over such small things as which restaurant to
eat in and which credit card to use to pay for it.
Suyuan Woo dies two months before The Joy
Luck Club begins. In the first chapter, the three
other mothers of the club tell Jing-mei that the
missing twin daughters, her now-adult sisters, have
been located in China. They show her a letter, give
her a check, and tell she her she must go to China
and share with her sisters all that she knows of
her mother and her mother’s life. When Jing-mei
protests that she cannot carry out this task, that
she does not know what she would say except that
Suyuan was her mother, the other women are hor-
rified. It is then that the mothers realize that their
greatest regrets are that their daughters know so
little of the realities of their lives—the lives they led
in China as well as their new lives with new families
in postwar America.
During the course of the novel, the mothers try
to redeem their relationships with their daughters.
In the chapter entitled “Waiting Between the Trees,”
Ying-ying St. Clair reveals that her “greatest shame”
is that she has led such an apathetic life after being
abandoned by her first husband in China that she
has no chi, no spirit, and that her daughter has none,
either. She intends to face her own ancient griefs
and reclaim her spirit, so that Lena may learn to
be more spirited herself and leave or repair her bad
marriage, rather than living a life filled with her own
regrets. Similarly, Lindo Jong thinks her daughter
Waverly must understand the “real circumstances”
of her mother’s immigration and integration into
American life in order to understand herself.
In the preface to the first section of the book,
“Feathers from a Thousand Li Away,” an unnamed
mother relates how she left China with a swan and
ended up in America with a single white feather,
which she had hoped to give her daughter someday.
The feather symbolizes all of the hopes she has for
her daughter and reveals that The Joy Luck Club is a
novel filled with good intentions as well as regrets.
In the preface to the novel’s final section, “Queen
Mother of the Western Skies,” however, a similar
character wishes she could teach her daughter how
to lose her “innocence but not [her] hope.” Through
the stories of the Joy Luck Club mothers and
daughters, Amy Tan demonstrates that regrets over
choices made and not made are inevitable. But the
lesson for the characters, as Jing-mei says on the last
page of the book, is to let go of regrets and enjoy the
joy and the luck they have.
Carman CurtonTENNySoN, LorD aLFrED
In Memoriam A. H. H (1850)
In Memoriam A. H. H., by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(1809–92), is a long poem written in 133 cantos of
uneven length describing the poet’s spiritual journey
following the sudden death of Arthur Henry Hal-