Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. Her parents, both Chinese immigrants, lived in various towns in California before eventually settling in Santa Clara. When Tan was in her early teens, her father and one of her brothers each died of a brain tumor within months of each other. During this period, Tan learned that her mother had been married before, in China. Tan’s mother had divorced her first husband, who had been abusive, and had fled China just before the Communist takeover in 1949. She left behind three daughters, whom she would not see again for nearly forty years.
After losing her husband and son, Tan’s mother moved her family to Switzerland, where Tan finished high school. During these years, mother and daughter argued about Tan’s college and career plans. Tan eventually followed her boyfriend to San Jose City College, where she earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English and linguistics, despite her mother’s wish that she study medicine.
After Tan married her boyfriend, Louis DeMattei, she began to pursue a Ph.D. in linguistics. She later abandoned the program in order to work with developmentally disabled children. Then she became a freelance business writer. Although she was successful, she found writing for corporate executives unfulfilling. She began to write fiction as a creative release.
Meanwhile, Tan’s mother was suffering from a serious illness, and Tan resolved to take a trip to China with her mother if she recovered. In 1987, after her mother returned to health, they traveled to China, where Tan’s mother was reunited with her daughters and Tan met her half-sisters. The trip provided Tan with a fresh perspective on her mother, and it served as the key inspiration for her first book, The Joy Luck Club. Soon after its publication in 1989, The Joy Luck Club garnered enthusiastic reviews, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for many months. It won both the National Book Award and the L.A. Times Book Award in 1989.
Tan continues to publish popular works. In response to the widely held opinion that she writes with a social aim—to portray the Chinese American experience—Tan often emphasizes that she writes first and foremost as an artist. She argues that her bicultural upbringing is her work’s source of inspiration but not its primary subject. Through her writing, Tan approaches issues that are universally applicable to all groups of people. She explores themes of family and memory, as well as the conflicts of culture that arise in so many American communities.
The Joy Luck Club contains sixteen interwoven stories about conflicts between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. The book hinges on Jing-mei’s trip to China to meet her half-sisters, twins Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa. The half-sisters remained behind in China because Jing-mei’s mother, Suyuan, was forced to leave them on the roadside during her desperate flight from Japan’s invasion of Kweilin during World War II. Jing-mei was born to a different father years later, in America. Suyuan intended to return to China for her other daughters, but failed to find them before her death.
Jing-mei has taken her mother’s place playing mahjong in a weekly gathering her mother had organized in China and revived in San Francisco: the Joy Luck Club. The club’s other members—Lindo, Ying-ying, and An-mei—are three of her mother’s oldest friends and fellow immigrants. They tell Jing-mei that just before Suyuan died, she had finally succeeded in locating the address of her lost daughters. The three women repeatedly urge Jing-mei to travel to China and tell her sisters about their mother’s life. But Jing-mei wonders whether she is capable of telling her mother’s story, and the three older women fear that Jing-mei’s doubts may be justified. They fear that their own daughters, like Jing-mei, may not know or appreciate the stories of their mothers’ lives.
The novel is composed of four sections, each of which contains four separate narratives. In the first four stories of the book, the mothers, speaking in turn, recall with astonishing clarity their relationships with their own mothers, and they worry that their daughters’ recollections of them will never possess the same intensity. In the second section, these daughters—Waverly, Jing-mei, Lena, and Rose—relate their recollections of their childhood relationships with their mothers; the great lucidity and force with which they tell their stories proves their mothers’ fears at least partially unfounded. In the third group of stories, the four daughters narrate their adult dilemmas—troubles in marriage and with their careers. Although they believe that their mothers’ antiquated ideas do not pertain to their own very American lifestyles, their search for solutions inevitably brings them back to their relationships with the older generation. In the final group of stories, the mothers struggle to offer solutions and support to their daughters, in the process learning more about themselves. Lindo recognizes through her daughter Waverly that she has been irrevocably changed by American culture. Ying-ying realizes that Lena has unwittingly followed her passive example in her marriage to Harold Livotny. An-mei realizes that Rose has not completely understood the lessons she intended to teach her about faith and hope.
Although Jing-mei fears that she cannot adequately portray her mother’s life, Suyuan’s story permeates the novel via Jing-mei’s voice: she speaks for Suyuan in the first and fourth sections, the two “mothers’ sections,” of the novel. Suyuan’s story is representative of the struggle to maintain the mother-daughter bond across cultural and generational gaps; by telling this story as her mother’s daughter, Jing-mei enacts and cements the very bond that is the subject of Suyuan’s story. When Jing-mei finally travels to China and helps her half-sisters to know a mother they cannot remember, she forges two other mother-daughter bonds as well. Her journey represents a reconciliation between Suyuan’s two lives, between two cultures, and between mother and daughter. This enables Jing-mei to bring closure and resolution to her mother’s story, but also to her own. In addition, the journey brings hope to the other members of the Joy Luck Club that they too can reconcile the oppositions in their lives between past and present, between cultures, and between generations.
The character list is divided into four sections, according to the mother-daughter pairs who narrate The Joy Luck Club’s sixteen stories. Each family’s list includes family members along with other characters associated with the family or who appear exclusively in the family’s stories.
Jing-mei (June) Woo - Jing-mei Woo is the newest member of the Joy Luck Club, having taken her mother Suyuan’s place after her death. The other members of the Joy Luck Club give her money to travel to China so that she can find her mother’s long-lost twin daughters, Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa, and tell them Suyuan’s story, but Jing-mei fears that she is not up to the task. See “Analysis of Major Characters.”
Suyuan Woo - Suyuan Woo was Jing-mei’s mother and the founder of the Joy Luck Club, a group of women who come together once weekly to play mahjong. She started the club in China, in the early days of her first marriage. During her flight from a war-torn area of China, Suyuan lost her twin daughters, Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa. In San Francisco, Suyuan revived the Joy Luck Club with Lindo, An-mei, and Ying-ying. See “Analysis of Major Characters.”
Canning Woo - Canning Woo is Suyuan’s second husband and father of her daughter Jing-mei. He met Suyuan in the hospital in Chungking, where she recovered from her flight from Kweilin. After Suyuan’s death, he travels to China with Jing-mei to meet her children.
Wang Chwun Yu and Wang Chwun Hwa Chwun - Yu and Chwun Hwa are Suyuan’s twin daughters by her first husband, Wang Fuchi; they are the half-sisters of Jing-mei. When an officer warned Suyuan to go to Chungking with her daughters to be with Wang Fuchi, Suyuan knew the Japanese were going to invade Kweilin. After many hardships and the onset of dysentery, Suyuan was forced to leave the twins by the side of the road, but Jing-mei and Canning are reunited with them at the end of the novel and tell them their mother’s story.
Lindo Jong - Lindo is a member of the Joy Luck Club. She teaches the power of invisible strength to her daughter Waverly, instilling in her the skills that contribute to Waverly’s talent in chess. She fears that in trying to give Wav. . .
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