The Joy Luck Club (Mass Market Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: fifth wife, mah jong table, youngest aunt, Huang Taitai, Second Wife, Yan Chang (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

"Intensely poetic, startlingly imaginative and moving, this remarkable book will speak to many women, mothers and grown daughters, about the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between generations and cultures," praised PW . Author tour.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1st edition (April 30, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804106304
• ISBN-13: 978-0804106306
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (454 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #271,050 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

72 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't help myself. I read it again., September 27, 1998

By A Customer

THE JOY LUCK CLUB, a novel by Amy Tan, tells of the intricate relationships between two strong-willed generations, four tough, intelligent American women and their equally tenacious Chinese daughters. The four families are connected through the Joy Luck Club, a mah jong group that meets each week. After its founding member passes away, her daughter is asked to take her place at the table and the stories begin. Each of the eight women narrates two stories from her own point of view except for the deceased whose daughter tells her stories for her. The mothers relate stories about their lives in China, and the daughters tell of the trials that they face growing up as first-generation Chinese-Americans. The women that Tan has crafted are well developed and extraordinarily believable. She shows the strong and weak sides to all eight of her main characters. Her men however, are flat and are there simply as supporting characters. This is to be expected since this is essentially a book about mother-daughter relationships and how women bond. Therefore, it is my assumption that this book is aimed, for the most part, at the female reader. Tan's literary style is truly novel. The way this woman writes can't be compared to anything that I have read in recent years. The novel that I feel comes closest to mirroring Tan's subject matter is THE GOOD EARTH by Pearl S. Buck. As I was reading, I found myself continually drawing parallels between the two. Therefore, if you found Buck's novel enjoyable, Tan's will be a pleasure as well. At face value, I feel that Tan wrote sixteen incredibly interesting stories. It is the undercurrent that runs throughout the novel, however, that makes it a classic. No matter what race you are, or when your ancestors came to America, the themes that rings true to all women are the struggles that we see underscored by the fierce love that is so obviously shared between each mother and daughter. The topic has universal appeal. Who hasn't been ashamed of her roots at one time or another? In this case, the mothers are trying to instill their Chinese spirits into their Americanized daughters before their ancestry is lost forever. The daughters fight their mothers every step of the way under the pretense of independence from overbearing matriarchs. However, I got the feeling that the conflicts arise because the daughters are somewhat embarrassed by their Chinese heritage. They seem to want to be as stereotypically "American" as they possibly can. What they all come to realize at the end of the book, though to different degrees, is that what they have been battling against is something that can't be fought. The daughter of the deceased expresses all of their feelings best when she proclaims' "I see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood." This novel reminded me of an old quilt my grandmother currently owns that has been passd down for generations. Each square is beautiful enough to stand alone. Each has its own special meaning in the history of our family, but when delicately woven together with the others, creates such a masterpiece that it truly ties each of us together. You can understand what it means to be a part of our family be examining the blanket. I like to think that THE JOY LUCK CLUB is the start of Amy Tan's quilt. She is telling the women that came before her that they will not be forgotten. She is assuring them that she has captured their spirits. Her dedication at the beginning of the novel is what allowed me to arrive at this conclusion. "To my mother and the memory of her mother...You asked me once what I would remember. This and much more." This review cannot possibly do THE JOY LUCK CLUB justice. Tan is a truly gifted storyteller and her novels must be experienced firsthand. The highest compliment that I can give is that in the midst of the busiest summer of my life, with summer readings stacked high atop my desk, and the buzz of the alarm clock awaiting me in less than five hours, I couldn't help myself. I read it again.

Reviewed by Colleen Clancy Collen died in a car crash along with two of her classmates on September 22, 1998, the morning after she read this review to her senior English class at Notre Dame Academy, Hingham, MA. Her English class would like to pay tribute to her memory by publishing her work in the Amazon Student Book Review column.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Joy Luck Club:book review, March 27, 2000

By	Jenny (Arvada, CO) - See all my reviews

"In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow." This was one of the many thoughts that four Chinese women had when coming to America. They all came looking for a better life and a better future.

This book takes place in San Francisco around the 1970's. The four women from China, Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair, form the Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club is a gathering of four women, and each week, one of them hosts a party to raise money and they eat special foods that bring good luck. Then they would play mah jong and whoever won got the money. This was their way of keeping their spirits up through their hardships. This was also what brought Jing-mei "June" Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair, together.

A problem that they all share is that since the mothers were born in China and the daughters were born in America, there is more of an inability for them to communicate with each other. The mothers have the tragedies of their childhoods in China in their memories, and the daughters have lived safe and comfortable lives when they were children. This difference in background also helped in the lack of understanding between them. Throughout the novel, all of them recall events in their lives and the lessons they learned from those events or from the people around them. They recall big turning points in their lives that changed them and helped to make them the people they are today. In recalling these events and the lessons they learned, they deal with similar problems in their present day lives and grow as individuals.

This book was very well written and it is a good example of how people can learn from the past. No one should dismiss this book because they think that it's a book for Asian people to read. The relationship between the mother and the daughter and the lessons they learn can be applied to any culture. The book was a little hard to follow at first because it jumps around to different people a few times and it's easy to get the people and the stories confused. Something that might help is stopping before each chapter and looking back at the previous stories as a reminder of what else has happened to the person in their life and to help keep the individual's stories separated. Also, look at their mother's/daughter's story to help tie that family's history together.

The author did a great job of tying the different stories together. Each person's story was different enough to keep the reader interested and allow them to discover new things, but they were also similar enough to make sure that the stories related to each other and helped to achieve the same purpose. From reading this book, a person could take the things that the characters learned and apply it to their own life. A person could also gain a little more understanding of another culture and also the differences between two generations.

37 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tapestry of Stories, October 7, 2004

By	Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Amy Tan's novel of many voices has become required reading in high school and college contemporary literature courses - and for good reason. Its intimate look at Chinese immigrants and their children opens up a wealth of questions about cultural acclimation in a country dominated by another race. Set in San Francisco and China, the novel begins with Jing-Mei ("June"), who has been asked by her father to take her recently deceased mother's place in the Joy Luck Club, ostensibly a mah jong gathering of her mother's closest friends, but also an investment club, symbolizing the merging of the two cultures. June agrees, although she doesn't feel she makes an adequate substitute for a woman who seemed so unlike her. When her "aunties" urge June to tell her sisters, women she has never met and who were left at the side of a road in China, about her mother's life, they are troubled when she confesses that she did not know her mother except as a mother. She sees that they fear that their own daughters might not know about them, and so she impulsively promises to find her mother's long lost children and tell them about their mother. In this way, the novel sets up its structure of interrelated stories. Although the stories of June and her mother Suyuan frame the others, those of An-Mei, Rose, Lindo, Waverly, Ying-ying, and Lena are no less important.

These women and their daughters form a complicated quilt of what it means to be a Chinese-American, whether born in China or in the United States, and they highlight the difficulties of bridging two cultures. The choices each woman makes are always difficult and often heart-breaking. Students might want to explore the difference in attitude between the Chinese women and their American daughters. Other topics for discussion include comparing and contrasting the relationships; the meaning of "Chinese blood" in the context of what unfolds; whether this is a true novel or a collection of stories; the ways in which the title refers not only to the actual Joy Luck Club but to the book in general; and the use of voice to convey characterization.

This accessible, well-written first novel is not Amy Tan's most accomplished (see The Kitchen God's Wife and The Bonesetter's Daughter), but it is her most widely read. Highly recommended for a general readership.