The Joy Luck Club

By Amy Tan

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Amy Tan's modern classic that examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters

"For me, The Joy Luck Club] 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

"Brilliant."--The Washington Post Book World
"A jewel of a book."--The New York Times Book Review
"Amy Tan is] a writer of dazzling talent."--Chicago Tribune

In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to play mah jong, remember the past, and gossip into the night. United in unspeakable loss and new hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the memories that display these women's strength, worries, and determination. 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 the matriarchal ties that they believe have stymied their ability to face the uncertainties of the future.

Intimate and moving, The Joy Luck Club shows us how the inheritance of pain and unspoken secrets can lead to misunderstanding--and yet how love can still offer the promise of reconciliation.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0399134204
• ISBN13: 9780399134203
• Release Date: March 1989
• Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Great Read!

These stories were amazing! The way this book shared both the mothers and daughters stories was magical and it brought everything together very nicely. I loved it, it's a book filled with heart and soul. Lovely

A heart gripping novel between 4 mothers and 4 daughters

This book had me rethinking all of my mothers struggle as someone coming from a poverty stricken country and her struggles there with our very cruel and harsh in-laws (my grandparents). The perspectives it puts you through is back and forth with an underlying story of understanding and duty. Beautifully written and memorable book.

A Tapestry of Stories

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.

Heart-warming story of four mothers and their daughters

Amy Tan writes about four mothers struggling through the hard times in life in order to live a better one in the future. The Joy Luck Club formed by four women in China allowed them to share their stories and forget their worries. These four mothers hoped that raising their daughters in America and raising them the American way will give them a more successful life. They hoped that their daughters will learn to take better steps in life, than to take the wrong ones that their mothers have taken in the past. But the relationship between a mother and a daughter is so deep that they learn that a piece of their mother's personality traits will always be with them. And no matter how Americanized a child may be raised, she will still see a Chinese part of herself inside. Amy Tan really has her own style of writing. She includes Mandarin lines which makes it interesting and her book is so detailed that it seems believable and very realistic. Each page is so touching that it makes me want to go onto the next to read what happens after. I would say that this is one of the best books I have read.