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THE JOY LUCK CLUB

by Amy Tan ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 22, 1989

With lantern-lit tales of old China, a rich humanity, and an acute ear for bicultural tuning, a splendid first novel—one...

An inordinately moving, electric exploration of two warring cultures fused in love, focused on the lives of four Chinese women—who emigrated, in their youth, at various times, to San Francisco—and their very American 30-ish daughters.

Tan probes the tension of love and often angry bewilderment as the older women watch their daughters "as from another shore," and the daughters struggle to free themselves from maddening threads of arcane obligation. More than the gap between generations, more than the dwindling of old ways, the Chinese mothers most fear that their own hopes and truths—the secret gardens of the spirit that they have cultivated in the very worst of times—will not take root. A Chinese mother's responsibility here is to "give [my daughter] my spirit." The Joy Luck Club, begun in 1939 San Francisco, was a re-creation of the Club founded by Suyuan Woo in a beleaguered Chinese city. There, in the stench of starvation and death, four women told their "good stories," tried their luck with mah-jongg, laughed, and "feasted" on scraps. Should we, thought Suyuan, "wait for death or choose our own happiness?" Now, the Chinese women in America tell their stories (but not to their daughters or to one another): in China, an unwilling bride uses her wits, learns that she is "strong. . .like the wind"; another witnesses the suicide of her mother; and there are tales of terror, humiliation and despair. One recognizes fate but survives. But what of the American daughters—in turn grieved, furious, exasperated, amused ("You can't ever tell a Chinese mother to shut up")? The daughters, in their confessional chapters, have attempted childhood rebellions—like the young chess champion; ever on maternal display, who learned that wiles of the chessboard did not apply when opposing Mother, who had warned her: "Strongest wind cannot be seen." Other daughters—in adulthood, in crises, and drifting or upscale life-styles—tilt with mothers, one of whom wonders: "How can she be her own person? When did I give her up?"

Pub Date: March 22, 1989

ISBN: 0143038095

Page Count: -

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1989

GENERAL FICTION

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by Amy Tan ; illustrated by Amy Tan

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

More by Hanya Yanagihara

by Hanya Yanagihara

PERSPECTIVES

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

More by J.D. Salinger

RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS AND SEYMOUR

by J.D. Salinger

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The Melodramatic Bookworm

Books. Movies. Travel. Thoughts.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan | Book Review

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan was the first book I read in 2023 and almost immediately, in a fit of emotion and productivity, wrote the review. I even uploaded this review to Instagram and Goodreads, too, I think. But somehow, to put my thoughts about this book here, seemed too intimidating for me. Maybe because writing a review on the blog needs me to open up more of myself than I would for the other media. There’s more space here for me to spill my thoughts and I know that once I start, it usually takes me more energy than I can spare to stop. And The Joy Luck Club is a book that makes me do this. Yes, it’s a confusing thing to reconcile oneself with, but it’s still a powerful narrative.

So, I’ll try to add more details on the existing review but I can’t promise I will succeed.

The Joy Luck Club , so widely loved and appreciated for being a description of the Chinese-American experience, can be summarized in one quote:

“This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou (respect) so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.”

If we were to look at our life stories, we’d need to go back to the very beginning, to see how it all started. And we couldn’t have started without our mothers, our birthgivers. And them, without their birthgivers. And the chain goes on. We go through what we do and sometimes, forget that our pain is our mothers’ pain. They carry double the pain – ours and theirs. Theirs, that we have no idea about because we weren’t there to witness it but which has left such a lasting impression on them that we feel like it digs through our own chests. And when we forget this, we must do what Amy Tan says in that quote. We must peel back our skin to reveal ourselves but also revisit the pain lurking under our mothers’ skins.

Book cover for The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

In The Joy Luck Club , Amy Tan tells the lives of two sets of people: one set of mothers and the other, their daughters. Through the game of mahjong, we see relationships evolve, truths come tumbling out, sacrifices being made and brushed aside, and perspectives bring trampled upon. One of the mothers is no more, so her daughter takes her place at the Joy Luck Club, and from there, we follow the stories of these women – mothers and daughters in different sections – and see where they are coming from.

It’s a rollercoaster of a ride, this book, because as you meet the perspectives, you take giant steps towards understanding them. And as you encounter the reasons behind the daughter trying to twist away and the mother trying to hold on but also trying to give her daughter the independence she herself couldn’t have and the mother’s mother who left such a deep impact that time shattered down the middle to affect future generations – you begin to feel a familiar ache in your chest. An ache that strips you down to your very essence and leaves you bare for the emotions to unrelentingly claw at you. An ache that is also a reminder of your past, of your truth, and one that fills you with a guilt that you realize you should have been feeling but that has been assuaged by years of your mother’s wordless understanding and strength.

Because isn’t this the story of every mother and daughter? We as daughters think that our mothers need to understand us in lieu of being our mothers. But isn’t the opposite also true? We need to understand our mothers as well. We need to see them and their pasts. We need to understand the depths of their love for us, the things they went through, the reasons behind them behaving the way they do. Given, not every reason needs to be forgiven or taken into stride. But understanding it and understanding them is the first step towards reconciling ourselves to those facts. And when we shut our eyes tight because of how we weren’t being understood, you’d better believe the heart of the woman who gave birth to you was cracking inside her chest too.

And The Joy Luck Club , combining the tumultuous waters of a mother-daughter relationship with the storm that is war and the silent, ringing despair that is being an immigrant in a foreign land, weaves a story so raw and real that it unnerves you for a bit. It might seem pretty ordinary at first. You might wonder what business is it of yours to be reading about four women playing mahjong. But it is so much more than that. It reveals itself in layers. It tells you tales of epic proportions with each page turned. It might not be the best representation of the Chinese immigrant story, as people on the Internet say. But take a sip of it and swirl it around in your mind, and you’ll taste the notes of all the pain and memory of tragedy that permeates the entirety of The Joy Luck Club .

I don’t usually say this but my recommendation would be: Even if you don’t see eye to eye with the premise or are not comfortable with how the representation is done, read this book just the once. That way, one of two things will happen: you’ll be vindicated in your opinion (which I hope not), or something in the book (there are quite some things) will shift something in your opinion. Either way, there’s nothing to lose. Give it a chance. ❤

So that was my review of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. What did you think of this review? Did you like it? Did you not like it? Have you read this book? If you have, what did you think of it? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll pick it up after reading my review? Let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!

I’ll see you in the next blog post.

Until next time, keep reading and add melodrama to your life! 😊

'The Joy Luck Club'

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Reviewed by Reviewed by Orville Schell

March 19, 1989

In 1949, when the Red Army marched into Beijing, America's ''special relationship'' with China abruptly ended, and so hostile did our two countries become toward each other that people on both sides of the widening divide seemed to lose the ability even to imagine reconciliation.

Apart from the international crises, and even wars, there was another consequence, which, although more subtle, was equally tragic. Those millions of emigrants who were part of the great Chinese diaspora - beginning in the middle of the 19th century when indentured laborers went to California, and ending in the 1950's when millions of refugees fled Communism - were left almost completely cut off from their homeland. While the members of the older generation who had grown up in China before Mao Zedong were at least able to bring a sustaining fund of memory with them into exile, the younger generation was denied even this slender means of connection to the ancestral homeland. Seeing old China as hopelessly backward, and contemporary China as besmirched by Communism, many in this new generation of Chinese-Americans wanted nothing more than to distance themselves as far as possible from the zuguo, or motherland.

But, unlike the children of European emigrants, they had obviously Oriental features, which made it difficult for them to lose themselves in the American melting pot. Living in the confinement of Chinatowns with parents who spoke broken English (''tear and wear on car,'' ''college drop-off'') and who clung to the old Chinese way, they felt an indelible sense of otherness that weighed heavily on them as they tried to make their way into middle-class American life.

When political barriers began to fall in the 1970's, older emigrants welcomed the chance to end their long and agonizing exiles. But their sons and daughters looked with a deep ambivalence on the idea of having to awaken a dormant Chinese side in themselves. And so, as the exterior world went about recognizing China, re-establishing diplomatic relations and initiating trade and cultural exchanges, these young Chinese-Americans found themselves wrestling with a very different and infinitely more complicated interior problem: how to recognize a country to which they were inextricably bound by heritage, but to which they had never been. It is out of this experience of being caught between countries and cultures that writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and now Amy Tan have begun to create what is, in effect, a new genre of American fiction.

Born in Oakland, Calif., in 1952 to a father educated as an engineer in Beijing and a mother raised in a well-to-do Shanghai family, Amy Tan grew up in an American world that was utterly remote from the childhood world of her parents. In ''The Joy Luck Club,'' her first novel, short-story-like vignettes alternate back and forth between the lives of four Chinese women in pre-1949 China and the lives of their American-born daughters in California. The book is a meditation on the divided nature of this emigrant life.

The members of the Joy Luck Club are four aging ''aunties'' who gather regularly in San Francisco to play mah-jongg, eat Chinese food and gossip about their children. When one of the women dies, her daughter, Jing-mei (June) Woo, is drafted to sit in for her at the game. But she feels uncomfortably out of place in this unassimilated environment among older women who still wear ''funny Chinese dresses with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches of embroidered silk sewn over their breasts,'' and who meet in one another's houses, where ''too many once fragrant smells'' from Chinese cooking have been ''compressed onto a thin layer of invisible grease.'' The all-too-Chinese ritual of the Joy Luck Club has always impressed her as little more than a ''shameful Chinese custom, like the secret gathering of the Ku Klux Klan or the tom-tom dances of TV Indians preparing for war.''

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Book Review

The joy luck club.

Readability Age Range

18 and older
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group USA Inc.
National Book Critics Circle Finalist, 1989; National Book Award Finalist, 1989 and others

Year Published

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine .

Plot Summary

Suyuan Woo comes to America without her twin daughters. Like An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong and Ying-ying St. Clair, her days are filled with painful memories of life in China. Suyuan meets these three other immigrants through the First Chinese Baptist Church in 1949. She recognizes they are suffering as she is, so she starts the Joy Luck Club. The women gather each week to eat, play mahjong and share stories. The club continues to meet for decades.

Each woman has children. Four of these are daughters who are close in age and grow up together. In the 1980s, Suyuan’s daughter Jing-mei (June) is a struggling publicity writer. Rose, An-mei’s daughter, is going through a divorce. Lindo’s daughter, Waverly, is a former chess champ who fears her mother will reject her husband-to-be. Lena, Ying-ying’s daughter, finds herself in a frustrating marriage where her high-earning husband insists they split all expenses 50/50.

The over-arching story begins with Suyuan’s death. Several months after she passes, the “aunties” invite June to take her place at the mahjong table. They also reveal Suyuan’s secret wish of reuniting with her twin daughters. As a young mother in China during wartime, Suyuan was forced to flee her city. She was weak and near death. She left her babies by the roadside with all of her valuables, hoping someone would save them.

She unexpectedly recovered and searched for them for years. Ultimately, she had to leave China without them. The aunties tell June the twins have been located, but just after Suyuan’s death. The women have saved enough money to send June to China to meet the twins in her mother’s stead. The aunties insist she tell the girls all about their mother. June wonders how well she really knew Suyuan.

Each of the eight women spends several chapters telling her personal story. Readers learn that after losing her babies, Suyuan emerged stronger. She came to America and started a new family. For many years, she and Lindo were subtly but fiercely competitive where their American-born daughters were concerned.

Lindo survived a miserable arranged marriage in China before slyly escaping her commitment and forging her own path to America. As a child, An-mei dealt with her mother’s abandonment and suicide before learning to stand up for herself. Ying-ying lived with a cheating spouse in China before entering a loveless marriage in America. She considers herself a ghost and expresses many paranoid concerns to her daughter.

Each mother desperately wants her daughter to respect and hear her. They want the girls to learn from their experiences and mistakes. Each feels her Americanized daughter ignores or dismisses her on some level.

In June’s narrative, she talks about her mother’s desperate attempts to make her a prodigy at something. Waverly Jong was a chess champ, so June’s mother needed something about which to boast, too. This led to many mother-daughter battles and June’s impression that she was never good enough. Waverly felt the pressure to succeed as well, and both girls discuss their ever-present compulsion to please their mothers.

Waverly and Lindo come to an understanding and even ponder a trip to China together. June comes to recognize and assume some of her mother’s courage. Rose talks about her passivity as a wife and her eventual ability to stand up to her soon-to-be ex. After years of being saddled with a 50/50 budget, Lena finally has the difficult conversation with her husband about their finances.

The narratives address decades of complicated mother-daughter conflicts. The story ends on a note of hope as these relationships improve. June goes to China to meet her half-sisters and fulfill her mother’s wish.

Christian Beliefs

Many Chinese immigrants, like the four mothers in the story, receive aid from the elderly American women of the First Chinese Baptist Church missionary society. The Chinese women feel compelled to join the church because it offers them aid and language classes. The Joy Luck Club women meet each other at church.

Waverly knows she needs to answer in the affirmative when the Santa at the church party asks if she’s been a good girl and believes in Jesus Christ. An-mei’s first three sons are named Matthew, Mark and Luke. She prays fervently for her fourth son, Bing, after he falls into the ocean and goes missing. The body is never recovered, and she loses her faith in God. She begins to use her Bible as a wedge to steady an uneven table leg.

Her daughter, Rose, sees all this and wonders if faith isn’t just an illusion. She sees that faith gave her parents confidence for a time, as though they felt like they were on a lucky streak. She decides you can’t trust anyone to save you, not a husband, not a mother and not God.

When Lindo wants to go to America, another girl encourages her to say she plans to study religion. The girl says that since Americans have so many different religious views, there is no right or wrong. They will respect Lindo, says the girl, if she claims to be going for God’s sake.

Other Belief Systems

Many of the native Chinese characters hold Buddhist beliefs and adhere to ancient superstitions. June learns her mother’s lost daughters were raised by pious Muslims who thought twins were a sign of good luck.

Authority Roles

The Chinese mothers want the best for their daughters. Some push and criticize heavily, believing this is what their daughters need to succeed. Rose’s future mother-in-law tries to talk Rose out of dating Ted. She essentially tells Rose it would be bad for her son’s future to marry an Asian girl.

Profanity & Violence

The words p— , b–tard , d–n , a– and s— each appear once. An-mei’s mother cuts flesh from her own arm and puts it in a soup, hoping to cure An-mei’s grandmother.

An-mei’s grandmother tells An-mei a story about a girl who poisoned herself after refusing to name the father of her unborn child. When a monk cuts her open, he finds a large white melon inside of her.

Lena frequently overhears domestic violence happening on the other side of her wall. The shouts, screams, pushing and shoving make her imagine people are killing each other.

Sexual Content

Lindo says she always expected her new husband to climb on her and “do his business,” but he never touched her. Her mother-in-law blames her for not having children, so she takes off her gown and tries to get her husband’s attention. He still won’t sleep with her. She eventually convinces her mother-in-law that a pregnant maid is carrying the husband’s baby. In this way, Lindo frees herself from the marriage.

In Lena’s narrative, she says her mother talked about women having babies they didn’t want. She warns Lena about men grabbing women off the street and making them have babies that they’ll eventually kill. Rose says she and her future husband felt the whole world was against them. This angst fueled their intense sexual relationship.

Lena has a sexual relationship with her boyfriend. Waverly feels resentful when she discovers she’s pregnant with her first husband’s child. She decides to abort it, but explains she accidentally went to the wrong kind of clinic. She says she was forced to watch a film full of puritanical brainwash. Seeing the fingers and toes of the fetuses made her decide not to abort her daughter. In the end, she thanked God she didn’t.

Waverly talks about the sexual chemistry she feels with her boyfriend, Rich. Waverly asks June if she’s nervous because her hair stylist is gay and could have AIDS. An-mei’s mother is raped by the man she’s eventually forced to marry. Ying-ying discovers her husband has had affairs with a number of dancers, American women and prostitutes. She aborts her own baby to get revenge on him.

Discussion Topics

Get free discussion questions for this book and others, at FocusOnTheFamily.com/discuss-books .

Additional Comments

Gambling: The Joy Luck Club women initially gamble small amounts of money on their games. They start sharing and investing the winnings.

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Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.