The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The Joy Luck Club’ is a touching, inspiring, and artfully crafted story of four mother-daughter relationships that endure not only a generation gap, but the more unbridgeable gap between Chinese and American cultures.
Amy Tan represented herself as Jing-Mei Woo in the novel. Her parents are both Chinese immigrants who raised her as a American. In her early teens, she learned that her mother had been married before in China. Just like Suyuan, Amy’s mother fled China, leaving behind her daughters. Amy and her mother argued about her college and career plans, like Suyuan wanting Jing-Mei to be a genius; in Amy’s case, to be a doctor.
When her mother had a serious illness, Amy promised her that they will go to China if she recovered. After her mother returned to health, they went to China where Amy’s mother was reunited with her daughters and Amy met her half-sisters. This trip provided Amy a new perspective on her mother.
‘The Joy Luck Club’ is clearly a tribute to inter-generational and intercultural connections. Much of the novel occurs in the form of flashbacks although it is set primarily in modern-day San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The novel is divided into four parts, each of which has four chapters much like the arrangement of the seats at the Mah Jong table. Each chapter is dedicated to the view of a mother or a daughter.
Each mother-daughter pair struggles with cultural and generational differences. The daughters tend to see their mothers as old-fashioned, over-bearing, out of touch, and even threatening. In turn, the mothers are exasperated over their daughters’ lack of understanding of Chinese culture as well as their attitudes towards their jobs. The mothers wanted to raise their children as Americans with Chinese culture. It is evident that the mothers find it hard to keep their daughters’ Chinese heritage because they are already Americanized. The mothers approach their daughters as they do the game of Mah Jong; they know that the best strategy is to make their moves secretly so that the revelation comes at the last minute. This way, the mothers shape their daughters with wisdom while seeming frank and ignorant at times. At the same time, the daughters are aware of their mother’s cleverness, which they alternately fear, love, resent and imitate.
It is in moments of conflict with one another and with others that each mother and daughter realizes the importance of the other person’s perspective.
The climax of the novel comes when Jing-Mei travels to China to meet her long-lost sisters. It was Suyuan Woo’s wish to be reunited with her daughters, but the essence of this wish lives in all the mothers – to be truly connected in spirit to their daughters. Jing-Mei has not only fulfilled her own mother’s wish, but also those of all the members of the Joy Luck Club.
The ways in which the various events of each woman’s life turn out to be interconnected with one another. Through this connection ‘The Joy Luck Club’ was able to portray the relationships of mother and daughters, in general, that they may not understand each other at times but in the end a mother and daughter’s love for each other can overcome their differences.