The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

I came across The Joy Luck Club while researching novels for my Classics Club list. I wanted to make sure to include authors from different cultures, and Amy Tan's name kept popping up while I was searching for non-white authors. I was vaguely familiar with the movie version of this book, so I decided to put it on my list. Initially, I didn't own a copy of it, but I happened to run across a used one on a trip to Book Barn (best used bookstore ever) last month. I decided it was fate and picked it up.

The plot of the novel revolves around four Chinese mothers and daughters living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The mothers are all friends and gather regularly for meetings of the Joy Luck Club, where they gossip, eat, and play Mah Jong. At the start of the story, one of the mothers, Suyuan Woo, has recently passed away. Her daughter, June Woo, is taking her spot at the Mah Jong table for the first time. As she joins her mother's friends, she thinks back on her mother's life and ponders how well she really knew her. From here, the book becomes a series of vignettes with each mother and daughter taking a turn telling stories about their lives and their relationships with each other.

The chapters featuring stories from the mothers mostly take place in pre-1949 China and focus on their childhoods. Each of the characters have varied upbringings, but all go through very difficult times. Many of their life experiences center around cultural Chinese events. For example, one is promised in marriage by a matchmaker to a boy at age two and delivered to his rather hostile family at age twelve. Another lives with her mother, who is a disgraced third concubine to a rich, elderly man. All of the women end up fleeing to America as Japan invades their country, in search of better lives for themselves and their children, and all must then adjust to living in a country vastly different from their own.

The chapters featuring the daughter characters are set in two different time periods. Each daughter has a vignette focused on their childhood in the 1950s-60s and another focused on their current lives in the 1980s. The daughters face different challenges from their mothers. They don't suffer under the crushing yoke of strict Chinese customs or the fear and terror of a war. Instead, they struggle to find the balance between their Chinese heritage and their American environment. Their experiences and upbringing are so different from their parents' that they struggle to understand each other. The issues taking center stage in their lives, like failing marriages or lack of motivation, are very difficult for their mothers to understand. As a result, the relationships between the pairs are often tense.

Underlying all the differences, however, there is a deep and indescribable bond. Each story in the novel works to show that although circumstances may vary wildly between parents and their children, love remains a constant and family is forever. Eventually, the reader comes to realize that the emotions the characters experience throughout their lives are the same, even if they way they arrive at those emotions are different. The mothers and daughters have more in common than they think, and in the moments when the mothers and daughters open up to each other, walls are broken down and understanding is reached. The Joy Luck Club is a very thoughtful exploration of the difficult relationship that exists between mothers and daughters, and a look at how Chinese and Chinese-American are vastly different things.

I really enjoyed this novel, and most of that enjoyment came from the fact that Amy Tan is a wonderful storyteller. Each vignette is easy to read and written in a way that is thought-provoking and beautiful. While I liked all the stories, the ones told from the perspectives of the mother characters were my favorites. These women radiated a quiet kind of strength and determination that I was immediately drawn to. I was very engaged in seeing how they pushed past their struggles to make their way to a new country. I also really liked how much I learned about China from their chapters. Tan does an excellent job integrating different aspects of Chinese culture into the text, including examples of religious practices, food, and family life.

The chapters from the daughter characters were strong in their depiction of the different emotions and insecurities that exist between mothers and daughters. This relationship is tricky when parents and their children grow up in the same country, but it becomes especially difficult when parents and children grow up in different places. It was interesting to watch the daughters try to match their Chinese sides with their American sides and try to please their mothers while remaining true to themselves.

One aspect of the novel that I felt could have been a bit stronger was the connection between all the stories. Aside from the first and last vignette, the chapters didn't relate to each other. The characters barely even interacted with each other across the stories, despite all being friends. Going into my reading, I assumed the the Joy Luck Club would be the thread that tied everything together, but the club only meets once, in the very first chapter. As a result, reading this felt more like reading a collection of short stories set in the same universe rather than a novel. This lack of connection didn't mean that the stories were bad at all, but it did make the reading experience a bit choppy. Without a true narrative to follow in my head, I kept getting the characters confused and forgetting which daughter belonged to which mother. It was also tough to remember which character had which backstory, as the stories didn't have an organizational pattern that I could identify aside from alternating a block of mother stories with a block of daughter stories. I had to keep turning to the front page of the book, which helpfully listed each mother and daughter pair for me to keep everyone straight. I still enjoyed the writing, but having to do this continually was a little annoying.

On the whole, however, I enjoyed The Joy Luck Club and I am glad to have read it. One of my favorite aspects of reading is learning about other times and places, and this novel provides that in abundance. Its exploration of mother/daughter relationships was similarly engaging and it made me think about the relationship I have with my own mom, and what tough times she might have gone through growing up that I don't understand. Any book that makes you want to call your mom is probably a good one, right? This was a thoughtful, easy read and a nice inclusion for my Classics Club list.

Challenge Tally
Classics Club (#20 on my list): 42/100 

Total Books Read in 2019: 18