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The Joy Luck Club: A Novel Paperback – September 21, 2006
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Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of a new documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix
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.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateSeptember 21, 2006
- Dimensions5.29 x 0.73 x 8.02 inches
- ISBN-100143038095
- ISBN-13978-0143038092
- Lexile measure930L
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Editorial Reviews
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"Beautifully written...a jewel of a book." —The New York Times Book Review
"Powerful...full of magic...you won't be doing anything of importance until you have finished this book." —Los Angeles Times
"Wonderful...a significant lesson in what storytelling has to do with memory and inheritance." —San Francisco Chronicle
“This Beloved Novel Is the Kind of Book We Need Right Now. Mothers and daughters lay at the heart of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club but in bridging the generational gap—and crisscrossing the globe—this 1989 novel imparts key lessons for forging ahead in trying times” —Martha Cheng, Wall Street Journal
“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians
“Reading it really changed the way I thought about Asian-American history. Our heritage has a lot of difficult stuff in it — a lot of misogyny, a lot of fear and rage and death. It showed me a past that reached beyond borders and languages and cultures to bring together these disparate elements of who we are. I hadn’t seen our history like that before. At that time, we hadn’t seen a lot of Asian-American representations anywhere, so it was a big deal that it even existed. It made me feel validated and seen. That’s what’s so important about books like that. You feel like, Oh my god, I exist here. I exist in this landscape of literature and memoir. I’m here, and I have a story to tell, and it’s among the canon of Asian-American stories that are feminist and that are true to our being. It’s a book that has stayed with me and lived in me.” —Margaret Cho
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; 1st edition (September 21, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143038095
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143038092
- Lexile measure : 930L
- Item Weight : 9.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.29 x 0.73 x 8.02 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,186 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #28 in Asian American Literature & Fiction
- #51 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #586 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, and two children's books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, which has now been adapted as a PBS production. Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club, and her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D0pwe4vaQo
www.amytan.net
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorAmyTan
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Because that's what this book is about: mothers who don't understand their daughters, and daughters who only very gradually begin to understand their mothers. Add to this a cultural shift from Chinese-born mothers to American-born daughters, and those relationships take on yet another distortion that challenges even the best of intentions to connect.
There's so much about this book I loved: the complex lives with rich backstory, the complicated relationships, the quirky personalities (especially of the mothers), and the wonderful way Tan used those characters to flip my view of the USA. "So-so security" rather than "social security" is one phrasing I'll always remember.
Perhaps because I was so eager to see what was happening with these characters that I read more quickly than I should have, or perhaps because the cultural differences between me and the characters were deep, but the characters were often blurred for me. I was grateful for the little cheat sheet, the character list, to help me keep everyone straight.
The Joy Luck club is everything wonderful you've heard it is -- but you'll get more than a good read out of it. Much more. It will touch you personally in ways you won't expect, and open your eyes to a world that's probably been invisible to you. This is a rare gift from a book, and one you won't want to pass by.
The book is a far richer story than the movie was. By that I mean that there is more background, more history, and much more Chinese culture(s). And the language used is beautiful to read. Amy Tan manages to evoke an entire milieu with her words. But the movie was what I was used to. I tried to put aside the images from the movie, but I kept returning to it and while reading I kept thinking to myself that this was not how it was in the movie.
So, the book. It is a story about 4 Chinese women and their 4 Chinese-American daughters. The book is set up in 16 chapters so that we get the perspective of all 4 mothers and their 4 daughters respectively, although since one mother has died, that part of the book is told from the perspective of the deceased woman's husband and daughter. In mainland China this woman, Suyuan Woo, was displaced during the war (Chinese-Japanese War during the 30s and 40s) and formed a Joy Luck Club that would play mahjong while sharing the joys and sadness in each others' lives. Now displaced again because of the Japanese invasion, Suyuan forms another Joy Luck Club in San Francisco in 1949, where she met the other 3 Chinese mothers through a local church.
In the book, and in the film, we see the backgrounds of the mothers in China. The stories are varied although there is an undercurrent of tragedy in all of them. Those were not easy times to live in China and certainly not as a woman. We are witness to an entire sociocultural world that somehow only gets transplanted in bits and pieces to the United States. This creates serious tensions in all four of the mother-daughter relationships as the mothers and daughters live in different worlds even while inhabiting the same space. So in addition to the usual generation gap, there is also a cultural gap. The mothers have all their history from China while the daughters all have their own emotional issues to deal with as children of immigrants in a new society. As they try to understand each other, the story progresses so that by the end, when we return to China, we see that an emotional bridge has been created between mother and daughter. A bridge that allows the gap to be crossed.
I love the book as much as I love the movie. The ending still made me cry. I look at the various mother-daughter relationships much differently now that I'm in my 40s and a mother of teenage girls myself, rather than the teenager I was when I watched it with my own mother, only able to really relate to the daughters at that time. Now, I understand certain things better and recognize pieces of myself in all of the mothers and all of their daughters now. Their stories are richly told, in their own distinct voices, and you can't help but be carried away with them as you read.
It's definitely worth reading again.
Top reviews from other countries
If you haven't experienced Amy Tan, then this book is a perfectly logical place to start!
Reviewed in Brazil on June 9, 2021























