"The Joy Luck Club" is a novel by Amy Tan.
The novel offers a poignant look at
Chinese culture and the relationships
between Chinese
mothers and
daughters, the Chinese culture, and the effect Western society has on these relationships. The reader learns about their fears and superstitions, their wisdom and unusual beliefs.
The story is quite simple: The Joy Luck Club is a group of four Chinese women who meet each week to play mahjong at the same time talk about their lives. The idea about the club originated in China when four women would meet to escape the horror of the Japanese invasion. Likewise, the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club has been meeting since 1949. When a founding member dies, her daughter Jing-Mei Woo is asked to join the Club.
The novel comprises a series of anecdotes which are told by these Chinese women and their daughters. The mothers tell stories of their childhood in China and about their mothers. Likewise, the daughters tell stories about their childhood and life in the US and talk about their mothers. The storytelling concludes with the mothers telling stories about their daughters.
At times, the continuity seems lost when the reader tries to focus on one story, and other stories from the other women interweave. But later on, the reader gets absorbed enough with all the other stories to bother with a particular story break on one woman-character.
There is a fascinating insight on the culture gap that exists between the Chinese mothers who grew up in China and the daughters who grew up in the US. Perhaps, migrants from cultures other than Chinese will be able to relate to. Here, the focus is obviously on Chinese culture, and therefore, insights are specifically geared towards the relationships between Chinese mothers and their daughters, in particular, the effect of differences in exposures, between the traditional Chinese culture (the mothers) and Western culture (daughters).
The novel warms the heart.