The Joy Luck Club
I have meant to read Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1990) for years. This fall I finally did just that. I found The Joy Luck Club deserving of its prestige as an iconic book capturing the Chinese-American experience. Throughout the novel Tan interweaves the stories of four mothers—all Chinese women who ended up in San Francisco—and their American-born daughters. It is a story about the complicated nature of mother-daughter relations, compounded by the unshared, unknown, unspoken backgrounds of the immigrant mothers. The novel takes the reader through all eight women’s perspectives, from late 20th century San Francisco to China many years prior.
At first, I found the shifts in narrative and perspective a bit jolting, but as I grew to know the mothers and daughters, I appreciated Tan’s style. I found myself jotting down notes so as to keep the various women’s stories straight in my mind. As I did so I realized that through the mothers’ stories the reader comes to know the daughters, just as the daughters’ stories shed light on their mothers. It is the interconnectedness of these stories that makes the novel so successful; the daughters and the mothers become more dynamic and interesting through one another’s memories and experiences.
Unsurprisingly, their stories are at moments very intense. The mothers all experienced or witnessed trauma before emigrating to the US and their experiences in San Francisco are at times punctuated with suffering. The tragedies woven into all their stories are heart-wrenching and at times jolting. Ultimately it is the act of looking back and recalling the traumas, tragedies, and lives the mothers left behind that enables them to find balance in their relationships with their American-born daughters. Tan’s novel investigates that moment of balancing one’s personal and familial past with one’s future in all eight of the stories.
In reading this novel, I realized just how little I know about Chinese history and culture. There were several moments I set down the novel to read more about traditions like a baby milk name or the red wedding candles referenced in various character’s stories; thus, in reading the novel I absorbed bits and pieces of traditional Chinese culture. One theme that emerged in all the stories was the importance of family and honoring one’s ancestors, which is a fundamental component of Chinese culture, as I understand it. Tan’s novel reinforces the importance of this tradition through the peace which all the characters tend to find as they acknowledge their personal and familial past. In fact, by the novel’s close it seems that much of the conflict between the mothers and daughters stems from their disconnection to their family stories; in attempting to protect their American daughters from the traumas of their Chinese lives, the immigrant mothers have withheld vital stories from both their children and themselves. As their stories percolate throughout the novel, connections between mothers and daughters increase.
In contrasting the immigrant parents and their American children, The Joy Luck Club anticipates a rich tradition of immigrant narratives. As immigration becomes an increasingly tense subject across the developed world, more and more writers investigate these themes. In so doing, these authors provide a world of readers the opportunity to inhabit an immigrant experience through fiction; I think as more of us do just that, we will find greater empathy for the challenges so many immigrants face. The Joy Luck Club challenges its readers to occupy the tension of an immigrant’s experience—leaving one’s homeland behind while attempting to blend and also honor one’s traditions—and the particular multi-generational challenges of that strain. As I read The Joy Luck Club I found myself thinking about A Woman is No Man (2019) which I read and loved last year, comparing the Chinese-American immigrant experience in the first with those of Palestinian-Americans in the later. Perhaps it is the current political climate, but I find myself more and more drawn to these immigrant narratives as our country struggles to embrace people from other places, just as the newly arrived toil to assimilate without losing their identity. Joy Luck Club is certainly an important novel among American immigrant fiction, and its themes seem no less poignant today as they were thirty years ago upon publication.
Bibliography:
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Putnam: New York, 1989.
