Author: Fives @ Down The Rabbit Hole

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.

Now I know this is one of the classics. In fact, I was offered the chance to read this in Grade 11, but I chose The Great Gatsby instead. This is one of the great novels by an Asian author back when it was rare to have that. I have always wanted to finish the rest of the “choices” that I would have had back in high school, and this is one of them!

The Joy Luck Club follows four families that immigrated from China over to America, all under different circumstances. These are all mothers with daughters, and the mothers meet together to play mahjong and chat and share their stories. This is really a tale of generational trauma, the sacrifices made by all the mothers for the chance of a better life in America. In contrast, their (American) daughters leading their American lives experience many of the same problems in a different context.