The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan

"What my books are about is relationships and family. I've had women come up to me and say they've felt the same way about their mothers, and they weren't immigrants."

- Amy Tan

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan has been nine months on The New York Times bestseller list. The book was first published in 1989 by Ivy Books.  The book has received incredible popular and critical success.  The novel highlights the lives of four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco, California who started a club known as "the Joy Luck Club," playing the popular Chinese game of mahjong.

Tan’s purpose for writing the book is evident in most of her works that is to bring out the cultural clash between the mothers and daughters. It is clearly portrayed also the way in which mothers and daughters are separated by time and place where one can hardly understand, comprehend or see the other. However, Tan gives more weightage to women characters in the novel, but this definitely does not restrict the readership of the book.

The main characters of the book include Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong and Ying-ying St. Clair and their daughters Jing-mei Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong and Lena St. Clair. The book is set in two phases, one, lives of women in a time where China during and before the Second World War was facing hardships; two, the lives of these women in America. The four time frames span the 1920s–1930s, the 1940s–1950s, the1960s, and the 1980s, respectively. The book consists of the childhood stories of women in China and their lives after migration in America; similarly, the book is also the story of their daughters depicting their childhood and adulthood life.

The narrative strategy of the book is structured like a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections in to create sixteen chapters. The four mothers and four daughters share stories about their lives in the form of vignettes, where each part is preceded by a parable relating to the game. The four sections parallel the four directions, which have symbolic value for the Chinese. It is not coincidental that in the games, Suyuan's corner was east, for “The East is where everything begins". The Joy Luck Club was founded in China, and China (the East) is where the mothers begin their journey and where the daughters' identities also begin. It is where the novel ends, with Jing-mei finding her full identity. The novel successfully combines numerous kinds of writing as Tan employs biography, the autobiography, the memoir, history, mythology, the folk tale, and the talk story into her writing.

The tense of the novel shifts from past to present as each character reflects on her past and relates it to her present life. The major themes and motifs of this book is relationship between mother-daughter, communication between mother and daughter, power of storytelling, immigrant identity, control over one’s destiny, sexism, racism, sacrificial love, loss, redemption The book is filled with old Chinese myths and grappling stories.

The Joy Luck Club was a critical and a popular success. Over 2,000,000 copies were sold, Tan received $1.23 million for the paperback rights, and it has been translated into several languages--including Chinese. The book has been adapted into film directed by Wayne Wang as well play by Susan Kim, which premiered at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York.

Amy Tan born in February, 1952 is an American writer. Tan has written several other bestselling novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter and Saving Fish from Drowning. She also wrote a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. Tan has successfully written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series which aired on PBS. Books seems to be her only escape as she says, "I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable."