While the novel as a whole deals with Jing-Mei
“June” Woo’s emotional discovery of her mother’s
life through the stories of the women of the Joy
Luck Club after her mother’s death, each charac-
ter in the story uncovers a closer link to her own
mother or daughter through storytelling. The
novel moves effortlessly from present-day Califor-
nia to wartime China and back again, focusing on
the individual events in each woman’s life to pro-
vide cohesion.
The first section of stories, “Feathers from a
Thousand Li Away,” includes June Woo’s intro-
duction to the ladies of the Joy Luck Club, a mah-
jongg club her mother started in wartime China
with three other women to create a sanctuary from
the horrible conditions they endured. The club
was re-created after June’s mother immigrated to
America, and, now that she has died, June has been
called upon to take her mother’s place at the game
table. June’s story also includes part of her mother’s
story about the conception of the club, the relief it
brought the players, and her eventual flight from
Kweilin, where they had been staying, just before
the Japanese invaded. Suyuan Woo, June’s mother,
took only what was most valuable to her, but along
the way lost nearly everything, including her twin
daughters, whom she had to abandon when dysen-
tery overtook her. Although she was rescued, she
was unable to retrieve the twins, and spent the rest
of her life in both China and America searching
for them. The Joy Luck ladies had located Suyuan’s
daughters, June learns, after her death.
The mothers’ stories, addressed to their daugh-
ters in hopes of explaining aspects of their lives that
have remained hidden either through purposeful
silence or negligence, reveal difficult and emotional
formative episodes in their lives. The stories, while
they relate intensely personal moments of famil-
ial duty, arranged marriages, drowned children,
marital discord, and personal angst, transcend the
merely personal and become emblems of women’s
lives throughout different eras and different cul-
tures. The mothers, working within an intensely
patriarchal system, use their own ingenuity to
carve out lives for themselves, eventually reinvent-
ing themselves in a new country. Their fondest
wish is that their American-born daughters, raised
in a land of opportunity, would be able to appreci-
ate the sacrifices their mothers had made for them
and to live fulfilling, satisfying lives. The daugh-
ters, exposed from birth to two cultures, struggle
between the dominant public American culture
that informs so much of their lives and the for-
mative private Chinese culture—incarnate in their
mothers—that they feel compelled to rebel against
or maintain privately. Throughout the story cycles,
the mothers’ and daughters’ voices begin to inter-
mingle until a continuity forms between the pairs,
and the fragmented experiences that each daugh-
ter thought were unique to her becomes whole
within the narrative of her mother. Each mother’s
strength, exhibited in the actions she took in her
own life and the lessons she learned from them,
spills over to ameliorate and complete her daugh-
ter’s experiences.
Using eight different points of view in the
novel, Tan resolves the narrative with June’s re-
union in China with her long-lost sisters. During
the meeting, each daughter feels the presence of
her mother, and several generations are united. To
accomplish the unity of the novel, Tan relies on re-
curring symbols such as the mah-jongg table, with
its four sides, four players, and four directions that
hint at the multiplicity of interpretations available
for each story. Other unifying devices include the
difficulty each woman has with language and cul-
ture, as exemplified in several stories by the food
each woman prepares and eats. As Tan links the
tales and then weaves them into the whole that
constitutes the novel, her poetic ability to reconcile
opposites and draw meaning out of each aspect of
life becomes as moving as the lives she creates.Bibliography
Bloom, Harold. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club: Mod-
ern Critical Interpretations. Philadelphia: Chelsea
House Publishers, 2002.
Huntley, E. D., ed. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion:
Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary
Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1998.
Vanessa Rasmussen142 Joy Luck Club, The