the joy luck club
by amy tan
★★★★☆
dates read: 11/22//22 - 11/25/22
"Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery."
the joy luck club is a book of solidarity for the daughters who have a complicated relationship with their mothers, the american children of immigrant parents, and the people who wish to be seen.
as a daughter to a chinese immigrant mother, this book resonated with me in a way that i’ve never resonated with anything before. there is something about the dynamic between asian mothers and their daughters that’s so difficult to put into words, and yet tan has done it. in reading the joy luck club i felt validated in my experience, but was also able to see my mother in a different light as well. she has her own history, a whole story before me, and before reading this book that was something i never thought about.
the joy luck club beautifully details the struggles of being apart of the asian diaspora while also acknowledging the hardships that can stem from being an asian american. both are hard, but in their own ways. the daughters of the story are ethnically chinese and nationally american, and as readers we follow them throughout the book as they attempt to mediate their polarizing identities through the relationships that they hold with their diasporic mothers. but how is anyone supposed to find common ground between two cultures that could not be more different? how is a leopard supposed to reconcile with an eagle?
it's an difficult question to answer, and a very big part of me thinks that it's almost impossible. the distance is too broad, too vast. the bridge would have to be constructed on both sides and in my experience, projects like that are often too one-sided. but i want to place emphasis on the word almost.
while speaking about chinese culture and the asian diaspora, the joy luck club really focuses in on intergenerational trauma. each of the mothers in the book has lived through trauma that will eventually influences the lives of their daughters. yet, such an impactful history goes unnoticed, tucked and buried away. as a reader who shares a similar background to the daughters in the story, it forces you to think about your own mother and your grandmother and her mother before her. it was difficult to not see myself and my mother in the characters.
the ending of the joy luck club made me more emotional than i had expected. this review is a lot more reflective of my personal experience than i had intended, but i think there comes a point in time where you have to confront the generational and cultural differences, and the story of jing-mei and her mother pose as a warning to do it now before it's too late. tan's book is very representative of immigrant families and the complicated dynamics of having first generation children.
“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. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.