Book notes: The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club was written in 1989 by Amy Tan and is an American classic. It was required reading in school for many people, and a great choice for a book club. I put this book on my list after sitting next to someone on a recent flight who gave it a glowing review: “I can’t believe I haven’t read this book before. It’s amazing!”. Much of the book takes place in San Francisco; I lived close by in Alameda for a few years.

The book follows 8 women: 4 mothers (Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-Ying St. Clair) and their daughters (Jing-mei “June” Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair). It is written as 16 stories, grouped into 4 sections. After leaving China, the 4 mothers met in San Francisco and formed the “Joy Luck Club” over games of mah jong in San Francisco around 1950.

The main themes of the book are: 1) The circumstances for how the mothers left China. 2) How the mothers wanted better opportunities for their daughters in America but not forget their Chinese character and traditions. 3) How the daughters sort out their Chinese descent while growing up American.

The writing is terrific. The stories build the narrative of each mother/daughter story, while occasionally interacting with the other mother/daughter characters. It adds in a nice mix of humor to serious topics. Ying Ying St Claire resists giving her daughter Lena advice at one point in the book, lamenting her daughter Lena’s “… wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink to the bottom and dissolve.” Cracked me up.

It’s striking how difficult life was in China in the early 1900s, especially for women. The Japanese attack caused one of the mothers, Suyuan Woo, to walk from one city to another and eventually abandon her 1 year old twin daughters on the road. An-Mei Hsu’s mother was left with no choice but to become a 4th wife (3rd concubine) to a wealthy man she did not like, leaving her to lament “There is nothing more to understand. That was China. They had no choice… That was their fate.”. It’s interesting to see the women discover that upbringing didn’t matter as much in America.

All of the daughters had failed first marriages. It’s tempting to assume that all 2nd generation Asian women living in San Fransisco in the 1980s had bad marriages, but it was probably just bad luck.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! All 4 of the mother/daughter story lines were compelling and wrapped up nicely. Even for the case of the St. Clair women, who drifted along until Ying-Ying is unleashed as the tiger she was born as in their last story.