Book Review: The Joy Luck Club

Title: The Joy Luck Club

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher: Putnam

Date: 1989

ISBN: my copy shows none

Length: 288 pages

Quote: “For a long time the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, ‘…it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.’ And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.”

Or should I quote the just slightly disreputable line I first heard on NPR, where one of the older Chinese women has to evict a tenant who calls her a @#$$% landlady, and she wails to her daughter, “He knows I’m not from Fukien!” I’ve never forgotten hearing Amy Tan read that quote; but more than the pun, I think, it was Tan’s dialect switching. Tan sounds like an American baby-boomer, but as she quoted the Chinese-born character’s line she suddenly sounded like a much older woman, her mother, perhaps, or grandmother, who was born in China. An author’s happening to have a gift for improvisational acting should probably be considered separately from the author’s books.

But there’s never been any question about Amy Tan’s books. I think Tan is on every critic’s Top Ten List of American Writers of the Baby-Boom Generation; either she or Barbara Kingsolver may be the closest analogue we in the United States have to Margaret Atwood. If you like lively feel-good stories with vivid details, an exquisite ear for dialogue, characters who are not noticeably Christian but whose stories manage to reflect Christian values (Tan is a Presbyterian), you’ll want to read all of her books.

This was the first novel that made Tan famous. Ironically, I think, it may be her weakest one. Four Chinese women who moved to San Francisco at about the same time have become friends; each of the four women has a daughter, and what happens in this book is that each mother and daughter tells her story. The stories naturally intersect but they don’t form much of a plot. They affirm that to some extent each woman has had an American Dream and made it come true; each one has a US-born daughter who’s grown up, found some success in life, and become mature enough to love her parents as an adult daughter should. They celebrate the richness and variety of life, both in old China and in modern California. Each of the older women has survived some very bad things. (One of them, as a girl, was supposed to be watching a baby brother at the beach, and he drowned.) Each has preserved the abilities to laugh, to love, and to learn. None of the women is supposed to be a perfect person. All of them are likable.

Women usually love The Joy Luck Club. Men sometimes gripe because it’s realistic. Real women’s stories are not romances. The eight protagonists in The Joy Luck Club mention having loved men, but the story is about their female bonding, mothers and daughters. Some of the men they’ve loved are still on the scene; some are not. Lindo Jong, whose unusual but understandable love for her first husband, Tsun-yu, is mentioned first in the book, is content with her current husband, Tin; and so on. This is not feminist bitterness; it’s realism, like the way Lindo Jong never changes her own name to Lynn or Linda, though other people call her Linda, but names her daughter Waverly.

One important theme in the book is how much of the mothers’ stories, which the reader knows, are and are not shared with their daughters—and how much of parents’ life stories should be shared with children. (In some Chinese families children weren’t supposed to know their parents’ history or even pronounce their parents’ names; elders were to be pampered while living and worshipped when dead, all in the single category of Honorable Ancestors.) One of the characters describes how her feelings are hurt when someone tells her what her stepfather’s family think of his relationship with her mother; she still feels, looking back, that that was the kind of thing a daughter shouldn’t have to know.

Each of Tan’s novels can be identified, not with a “moral,” exactly, but with a beneficial effect it should have on an attentive reader. For The Joy Luck Club that would be love of parents. Given half a chance, this novel will remind you to call or visit your mother, if you still have that opportunity. Father, too, if you think about it a little longer. Respect their privacy, and cherish what they choose to share of their stories.