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The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan’s 1989 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction multi-generational saga follows four mothers and four daughters, examining complicated family dynamics, gender, race, class, and more. In 1949, four recent Chinese immigrants meet every week to play mahjong and discuss their new lives in San Francisco. They call themselves the Joy Luck Club. While the women share their personal stories with each other, they don’t tell their daughters and their daughters in turn disregard their advice, thinking it won’t apply to their second generational American lives. Their interpersonal relationships are complex and ever changing, which means there’s so much to talk about here.
About the Book
Publisher’s description:
“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it 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
Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s “saying” the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. “To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.” Forty years later the stories and history continue.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. 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 their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
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