The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan

THE JOY LUCK CLUB - AMY TAN

The writer

Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California in 1952. Both of her parents were immigrants from China. Her father died when she was a child and the family moved to Switzerland for a time.

Tan´s mother wanted her to become a doctor but Tan left her pre-med course in order to study English and Linguistics at San Jose State University. She also studied for a doctorate in Linguistics, first at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley.

Although Tan later prospered as a business writer, she did not find fulfillment in her career. She began to study jazz piano as a counterpoint to long work hours. She also began to write fiction and soon found an agent.

Just as she was embarking on this new career, Tan's mother fell ill. Tan promised herself that if her mother recovered, she would take her to China, to see the daughter who had been left behind almost forty years before. The trip was a revelation for Tan. It gave her a new perspective on the difficult relationship with her mother, and inspired her to complete the book of stories she had been working on. These stories became her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, which she dedicated to her mother.

Upon its publication in 1989, Tan's book won enthusiastic reviews and spent eight months on the New York Times best-seller list. Her subsequent novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) confirmed her reputation. Since then Amy Tan has published two books for children, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat and two novels The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001). The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, appeared in 2003.

The book

In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk about their lives. Forty years later the stories and history continue.

After her mother Suyuan's death, thirty-six year old Jing-mei (June) Woo takes her place in The Joy Luck Club with An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair. Each mother/daughter relationship is full of sadness, anger, misunderstanding and joy. June, for example, isn't sure she can replace a dead mother she hardly knew. Then she learns that her mother's other daughters have been found: they live in China, and the other women of the Joy Luck Club are sending June to meet them.

The book mixes narratives from the past in China with ongoing narratives taking place in the present-day United States in a complex structure which gradually reveals more about the motivations of the characters. The novel ends with June´s journey to China, where she fulfils her mother´s most precious wish.

Questions to think about while reading

The novel raises questions about parenting (especially mothering) in different cultures. Does the novel challenge our ideas about good and bad mothers? How do our perceptions of the mothers in the novel change as the novel develops?

´´Why do you think that you are missing something you never had?¨ To what extent is this question crucial to the whole book? Can we miss what we have never had?

Are the characters in the book all Chinese - American? How do they define themselves? Do we find or make our personal identities?