The Joy Luck Club (Study Guide)

The Joy luck Club

Summary of the Novel

The novel contains four sections, each beginning with a vignette depicting a stage in the life cycle. The four stories in each section explore the relationship between the mothers and the daughters at the same stage.

One series of stories focuses on Suyuan Woo, who comes to America in 1947, having lost her family, including twin daughters, during war. She does not know her daughters were rescued. Now remarried, she settles in San Francisco, has a daughter, Jing-mei (June), and starts a Joy Luck Club similar to one in China with three other women. The four form strong friendships.

As she grows up, Jing-mei and her mother struggle to understand one another. They never completely resolve their differences, and Suyuan dies unexpectedly. At the next meeting of the Joy Luck Club, her mother’s friends tell Jing-mei that Suyuan’s twin daughters have been found. They give her a check so she can visit them. As the novel ends, she meets her sisters in Shanghai.

A second set of stories focuses on An-mei, who lives with her grandmother because her mother has been disowned. When An-mei is nine, her grandmother dies; and An-mei leaves with her mother to live in the home of a wealthy man and his other wives. An-mei learns how her mother was forced into a dishonorable second marriage and why she has no control over her own life. Her mother’s subsequent suicide provides An-mei a better life.

As an adult An-mei comes to San Francisco. She and her husband have seven children, including Rose. Rose marries Ted, a dermatologist, who has an affair and divorces her. Rose is overwhelmed but recovers.

The third series of stories focuses on Lindo. She marries Tyan-yu, but he never sleeps with her. Unable to tell her domineering mother-in-law the truth, she devises a clever plan and is released from her marriage honorably. She comes to San Francisco and marries Tin Jong. They have three children—Winston, Vincent, and Waverly.

Waverly is a child chess prodigy. She and her mother maneuver through their differences throughout her childhood and into adulthood. Their differences climax over Waverly’s fiancé, Rich Schields, and the two women reconcile.

The fourth series of stories focuses on Ying-ying. Born into a wealthy family, she is a spirited child who nearly drowns when she is four. She grows into a haughty young woman and marries a crude man who abandons her after she becomes pregnant. Ten years later she marries Clifford St. Clair, an American exporter, even though she doesn’t love him. They come to San Francisco and have one daughter, Lena. Their second child is stillborn, and Ying-ying is depressed for months afterward. Her depression affects Lena.

As an adult Lena marries Harold Livotny, who takes advantage of her. Ying-ying feels responsible for raising so powerless a daughter. She wants to encourage Lena to speak up for herself.

Estimated Reading Time

The novel consists of 16 short stories, each requiring 25 to 40 minutes to read, and four vignettes requiring five minutes each to read. The entire novel can be completed in about 10 to 11 hours.

The Life and Work of Amy Tan

Amy Tan’s grandmother, Jing-mei, was widowed when her daughter Daisy was young. She was later forced to marry a wealthy man who had raped her. Since Chinese custom prohibited widows from remarrying, both Jing-mei and Daisy were shunned. Jing-mei eventually committed suicide by eating food with raw opium in it. Daisy later married a man who abused her. She divorced him and came to America, but he forced her to leave their three daughters behind.

In California she met John Tan, an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who had also fled China in the late 1940s. They married soon afterwards. Amy, their second child and only daughter, was born in 1952. Her Chinese name, An-mei, means “gift from America.”

Amy Tan said her parents “wanted us to have American circumstances and Chinese character” (Current Biography, 560). However, in order to assimilate, the children felt forced to choose “American” ways and to refuse “Chinese” things. This led to a deep sense of “shame and self-hate,” Tan said (Current Biography, 560). For example, she once wanted to change her Chinese features so much that she went to bed with a clothespin on her nose every night for a week.

After the deaths of her father and older brother, eight months apart, the family spent a year in Europe. Tan was 16 years old. She finished high school early; when her family returned to America, she began college. There she met Louis DeMattei, her future husband, who is now a tax attorney.

Daisy Tan was unhappy when her daughter not only transferred schools to be with DeMattei, but also changed from pre-med to studying English and linguistics. The two did not speak for about six months. Amy Tan completed both her B.A. and M.A. degrees and was working on a doctorate when she left school to work with retarded and developmentally disabled people. Later she started a successful free-lance nonfiction writing business, partly in response to a supervisor who severely criticized her writing. When she and her husband bought Daisy Tan a place to live, Daisy conceded that perhaps writing was a good career for her daughter.

In 1987 Amy Tan went to China with her mother to meet her half-sisters, whom she did not know about until she was 26 (“Mother With a Past,” 47). Tan said later, “There was something about this country that I belonged to. I found something about myself that I never knew was there” (Current Biography, 561).

Her first short story, “Endgame,” was published in 1985 and was followed by “Waiting Between the Trees.” When she learned that publishers were interested in the outline for The Joy Luck Club, originally titled Wind and Water, she left her free-lance business and finished the novel in four months. It was followed by The Kitchen God’s Wife in 1991 and The Moon Lady, a collaboration with Gretchen Schields, in 1992. She also worked on the movie screenplay of The Joy Luck Club, released in 1993.

Summary

The Joy Luck Club takes its title from a gathering begun in wartime China by Suyuan Woo, who met with three women in a weekly attempt to maintain their sanity and luck. They prepared special foods and played mah-jongg, even though the city was filled with horror. In 1949, in San Francisco, Suyuan resumed the tradition with three new friends.

One critic has suggested that the book is structured like the four corners of the mah-jongg table at which the women sit, with four stories in each of the book’s four sections, and four mother-daughter pairs. In mah-jongg, one critic has noted, “The game starts, always, with the east wind,” and June Woo, whose narrative begins and ends the book, sits on the east side, taking her dead mother’s place. The game ends when one player has a complete hand, and June completes her mother’s life and dearest wish when she returns to China, with a ticket paid for by the Joy Luck Club, to meet the two half-sisters her mother was forced to leave behind in her flight.

Recurring motifs link the stories of each mother-daughter pair. The second mother, An-mei Hsu, bears a scar from the spilling of hot soup on her neck as a child, an accident that nearly killed her. She carries a grievous inner scar as well: Her own mother had been banished, her name never spoken. Only later does she understand how her mother dishonored the family by becoming the third concubine of a wealthy married man. Yet when An-mei’s grandmother was dying, her mother returned to cut a piece of flesh from her own arm to make a magic healing broth. “This is how a daughter honors her mother,” An-mei remembers. “It is shou [respect] so deep it is in your bones.”

This same mother poisoned herself, timing her death so that her soul would return on the first day of the lunar new year to settle scores with the rich man and Second Wife, ensuring a better future for her children. Dead, she had more power than ever in life.

Lindo Jong, the daughter of peasants, was betrothed at the age of two to her first husband and became a servant in his mother’s house until their marriage. Although the family nearly convinced her that a daughter belonged to her mother-in-law and that her husband was a god, Lindo discovered herself on her wedding day: “I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me.”

Thus, Lindo’s willful and brilliant American daughter Waverly learns “the art of invisible strength” at six from her mother, who tells her, “Strongest wind cannot be seen.” Waverly becomes a chess prodigy, but her early confidence falters as she tries to outwit the mother she fears. The tension between mother and daughter seems strongest with this pair. Waverly wants to become her own person, but her mother wonders, “How can she be her own person? When did I give her up?”

Little Ying-ying St. Clair, daughter of the wealthiest family in Wushi, celebrated the Moon Festival by falling off an excursion boat at night and never found herself again. After an unfortunate first marriage, she lost her “tiger spirit” and became a listless ghost. Motifs of the dark other self, of dissolution and integration, appear in her stories, yet mother-daughter love forms a stronger bond. Ying-ying’s daughter struggles to rescue her mother’s spirit after the devastating birth of an anacephalic child, and the mother, in turn, tries to give her daughter courage to break free of an empty marriage: “I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter’s tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.”

In the final section of the book, the mothers connect their past to their daughters’ lives and encourage them to be strong. As a Chinese grandmother tells her baby granddaughter, “You must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope.”

Characters List:

1.    Jing-mei (June) Woo: narrator of most of this story; age 36, daughter of Suyuan and Canning Woo

2.    Suyuan Woo: narrator of part of the story; Jing-mei’s mother, Canning Woo’s wife, and founder of the Joy Luck Club. She dies two months before the story begins

3.    Canning Woo: Suyuan’s husband; Jing-mei’s father

4.    An-mei Hsu: Suyuan’s friend; one of the members of the Joy Luck Club

5.    George Hsu: An-mei’s husband

6.    Lindo Jong: Suyuan’s “best friend and arch rival”; one of the members of the Joy Luck Club

7.    Ying-ying St. Clair: Suyuan’s friend; one of the members of the Joy Luck Club

8.    Uncle Jack: Ying-ying’s younger brother

9.    Waverly Jong: Lindo’s daughter, one month younger than Jing-mei

10. Lena St. Clair: Ying-ying’s daughter

11. Popo: An-mei’s maternal grandmother. An-mei and her brother have lived with her the last five years

12. An-mei’s mother: she is never given a name. Her family has ostracized her because she disgraced them

13. An-mei’s brother: younger than An-mei

14. Uncle and Auntie: Popo and the two children live with them in Ningpo, China

15. Lindo’s mother: never named

16. Huang Taitai: Lindo’s mother-in-law, mother of Tyan-yu

17. Tyan-yu: Lindo’s first husband

18. The village matchmaker: she arranges both the match and later, the wedding, between Lindo and Tyan-yu

19. The matchmaker’s servant: her mistake gives Lindo a chance to escape her marriage honorably

20. Another servant girl: she works for Huang Taitai and is kind to Lindo. When she becomes pregnant, Lindo helps her

21. Amah: Ying-ying’s nanny

22. Chang-o, the Moon Lady: in Chinese tradition, wife of the Master Archer

23. Hou Yi, the Master Archer: husband of Chang-o, associated with the sun

24. The Queen Mother of the Western Skies: also called Syi Wang Mu, associated with the yin principle

25. Mama and Baba: Ying-ying’s parents

26. Number Two and Number Three: Ying-ying’s younger half sisters

27. The family on the fishing boat: they rescue Ying-ying

28. Waverly Jong: Lindo’s only daughter and youngest child; narrator

29. Vincent and Winston Jong: Lindo’s older brothers

30. Lao Po: an old man in the park who helps Waverly learn chess

31. Lena St. Clair: Ying-ying’s daughter, 10 years old at the time of this story

32. Clifford St. Clair: Ying-ying’s husband, Lena’s father

33. Teresa Sorci and Mrs. Sorci: neighbors in the St. Clairs’ apartment building. Teresa is about 12 years old. Her bedroom is next to Lena’s

34. Ted Jordan: Rose’s husband, a dermatologist

35. Mrs. Jordan: Ted’s mother

36. George Hsu: An-mei’s father

37. Janice, Ruth, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Bing Hsu: Rose’s sisters and brothers

38. Old Chong: Jing-mei’s deaf piano teacher

39. Harold Livotny: Lena’s husband, an architect

40. Arnold Reisman: a neighbor who was mean to Lena when they were children

41. Mr. Rory: Waverly’s hairdresser

42. Marlene Ferber: Waverly’s friend

43. Marvin Chen: Waverly’s first husband

44. Shoshana: Waverly’s and Marvin’s daughter

45. Rich Schields: Waverly’s fiancé, a tax attorney

46. Lisa Lum: Vincent Jong’s girlfriend

47. Old Mr. Chou: the Chinese equivalent of the Sandman

48. Wu Tsing: An-mei’s mother’s second husband, a wealthy merchant in Tientsin

49. Yan Chang: An-mei’s mother’s personal servant

50. First Wife: Wu Tsing’s official wife, mother of two daughters. She is addicted to opium

51. Second Wife: Wu Tsing’s concubine. She dominates the other women in the household

52. Third Wife: Wu Tsing’s concubine. She has three daughters

53. Fifth Wife: Wu Tsing’s most recent concubine. She is very young

54. Syaudi: son of Wu Tsing and An-mei’s mother. Second Wife claims him as her own

55. Ying-ying’s first husband: never named, Ying-ying called him “Uncle” when she first met him. He is murdered by a mistress

56. Lindo’s helper in Peking: never named, she gives Lindo advice about coming to America

57. Lindo’s helper in San Francisco: never named, she helps Lindo get an apartment and job

58. Aiyi: Jing-mei’s great-aunt

59. Lili: Aiyi’s great-granddaughter

60. Wang Chwun Yu and Wang Chwun Hwa: Suyuan’s twin daughters, Jing-mei’s half sisters. Their names mean “Spring Rain” and “Spring Flower”

61. Mei Ching and Mei Han: the couple who find and raise the twins

62. Suyuan’s schoolmate: never named. She recognizes the twins and contacts Suyuan with their address

Chapters Summary:

Feathers from a Thousand Li Away, Vignette Summary and Analysis

Summary

A young woman leaves China to come to America. She brings with her a swan she plans to give to the daughter she will have someday, a daughter whose life will be much better than hers. Once they arrive in America, though, immigration officials take the swan away from her, leaving her only a feather.

As the vignette concludes, the woman has grown old. She has a daughter but has never given her the feather because she wants to be able to explain her “good intentions” in “perfect American English.”

Analysis

This vignette focuses on the mother’s actions when she was young and their effects later. Both the woman and the daughter are archetypes, or patterns, of the characters in the rest of the novel. Readers often try to identify the woman in the vignette as Suyuan, the mother in the next story, but she is not. The four stories in this section also focus on the mothers when they were young. As the novel progresses, the reader will see these events affect both mother and daughter later.

The swan is a symbol of the mother. In the first paragraph, the vendor says the swan was “a duck that stretched its neck”; in the second paragraph both swan and mother “[stretch] their necks toward America.” The swan is described as “a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” suggesting that the mother’s life in America will be better than she had hoped for in China. When immigration officials confiscate the swan, Tan describes the mother as “fluttering her arms” like flapping wings.

The feather represents the mother’s “good intentions.” She wants to give her daughter part of herself, but she hesitates, waiting until she can explain herself “in perfect American English.” The fact that the woman is now old suggests that day will never come, the explanation will never be given, and the daughter will never understand exactly what her mother intended.

The giving of gifts forms a motif throughout this novel. As you read, pay attention to how often gifts are given and whether they are appreciated.

The Joy Luck Club Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Jing-mei (June) Woo: narrator of most of this story; age 36, daughter of Suyuan and Canning Woo

Suyuan Woo: narrator of part of the story; Jing-mei’s mother, Canning Woo’s wife, and founder of the Joy Luck Club. She dies two months before the story begins

Canning Woo: Suyuan’s husband; Jing-mei’s father

An-mei Hsu: Suyuan’s friend; one of the members of the Joy Luck Club

George Hsu: An-mei’s husband

Lindo Jong: Suyuan’s “best friend and arch rival”; one of the members of the Joy Luck Club

Ying-ying St. Clair: Suyuan’s friend; one of the members of the Joy Luck Club

Uncle Jack: Ying-ying’s younger brother

Waverly Jong: Lindo’s daughter, one month younger than Jing-mei

Lena St. Clair: Ying-ying’s daughter

Summary

Jing-mei, the narrator, attends a meeting of the Joy Luck Club to replace her mother, who has died two months earlier. The story flashes back to Suyuan and Canning Woo’s arrival in San Francisco. Suyuan invites three other women to start the Joy Luck Club. As Jing-mei remembers what her mother told her about the first Joy Luck Club, in China, the story shifts, and Suyuan becomes the narrator.

Suyuan’s first husband, an officer in the Kuomintang, had sent her and their twin daughters to Kweilin to escape the invading Japanese. To fight misery and despair, she started the Joy Luck Club with three other women. One morning an army officer warned her the Japanese were about to invade. She packed her daughters and some household belongings into a stolen wheelbarrow and fled on foot. When she arrived in Chungking, however, she had only the clothes she wore. When Jing-mei asks what happened to the babies, Suyuan says only, “Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.”

The story returns to the American Joy Luck Club, now a successful stock investment club. After eating, the women play mah jong, with Jing-mei taking her mother’s place. While they play, the aunties gossip and talk about their children.

When Jing-mei rises to leave, the aunties ask her to stay. Ying-ying tells her Suyuan had never given up hope of finding her twin daughters. Just after her death, someone found them. The aunties give Jing-mei a check for $1,200 and tell her to visit her sisters and tell them about her mother. Jing-mei protests that she doesn’t know what to tell them. The aunties, incredulous, point out different facets of Suyuan she can talk about.

Jing-mei suddenly understands that they are afraid their own daughters also don’t know anything about them. She says, “I will remember everything about her and tell them.” Doubtful but hopeful, they return to telling stories, leaving Jing-mei sitting at the mah jong table, “on the East, where things begin.”

Analysis

“The Joy Luck Club” is the title of both the novel and this story. Author Amy Tan introduces and explains the concept of “joy luck” by showing two different Joy Luck Clubs in action.

The first Joy Luck Club, in Kweilin, shielded the women’s spirits against the harsh living conditions and constant threat of war. Suyuan had dreamed of visiting Kweilin, a place of great natural beauty, where she thought she would be perfectly happy. Instead, she and the other refugees lived with bad food, disease, overcrowding, and uncertainty. To combat their fear, the women played mah jong once a week. “Each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.”

The second Joy Luck Club, in San Francisco, offered hope to women with a common bond. Jing-mei says:

"My mother could sense that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldn’t begin to express in their fragile English".

The second Joy Luck Club becomes an investment group and social gathering by the time Jing-mei is an adult, and the women have formed strong friendships.

“Joy luck” has become a concept the women would like to pass on to their American-born daughters, who do not understand the tragedies their mothers experienced. The mothers are afraid they will have “grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.”

Tan uses the device of the Joy Luck Club meeting to introduce the mothers and the daughters. She offers initial insight into the mothers’ characters by giving Suyuan’s opinion of them and develops the characters of Jing-mei (June) and Suyuan.

The conversation about black sesame-seed soup in the first few paragraphs reveals that Jing-mei understands some Chinese, but imperfectly. Her statement, “I can never remember things I didn’t understand in the first place,” begins the development of two conflicts. In the first, Jing-mei struggles with understanding her Chinese heritage. Not until the final pages does she come to terms with it. The second conflict, overcoming language problems, affects all the characters to greater and lesser degrees. Later in the story, Jing-mei states she felt as though “my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did. I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese.” Mothers and daughters struggle with their imperfect understandings of one another, seeking reconciliation.

Suyuan is a complex character. She has built such strong friendships with An-mei, Lindo, and Ying-ying that they are willing to pay for Jing-mei to visit China and see Suyuan’s daughters. However, Suyuan was also very critical of them. She claimed An-mei had no spine and never thought about what she was doing; she competed with Lindo by comparing their daughters; and she said Ying-ying was not hard of hearing but “hard of listening.” This criticism of her best friends suggests she is able to see and appreciate someone beyond her flaws. The reader will see her apply this appreciation to her own daughter as the novel progresses.

This story also introduces a continuing motif, the idea of seeking balance. Suyuan’s criticism runs along the lines of “Something was always missing. Something always needed improving. Something was not in balance.” Auntie Lindo explains that Jing-mei will take her mother’s place at mah jong because without her the women are “like a table with three legs, no balance.” These are minor examples of what will be a significant concept in the novel.

Scar Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Popo: An-mei’s maternal grandmother. An-mei and her brother have lived with her the last five years

An-mei’s mother: she is never given a name. Her family has ostracized her because she disgraced them

An-mei’s brother: younger than An-mei

Uncle and Auntie: Popo and the two children live with them in Ningpo, China

Summary

An-mei, now an old woman, narrates this story. As a child, she and her brother live with Popo, Auntie, and Uncle. As Popo grows increasingly ill, she calls An-mei to her bedside and tells her stories with a moral to them. Both Popo and Auntie tell the children that their mother has no respect for the family. An-mei feels unlucky to have such a mother.

The story jumps ahead to when An-mei is nine, and her mother returns. Auntie, Uncle, and the

servants, unhappy with her presence, ignore her. She goes to Popo’s room and begins to take care of her. Popo is so sick she doesn’t even know who is there. If she had known who it was, she would have thrown An-mei’s mother out.

An-mei says her mother’s voice confused her, “a familiar sound from a forgotten dream.” Later she remembers when she had heard her mother’s voice before.

She had been four. During an argument between her mother and the rest of the family, a large pot of hot soup on the dinner table spilled on An-mei’s neck. The burn was very serious. The first night Popo told An-mei the family had made burial clothes for her, her mother had left, and if An-mei did not get well soon, her mother would forget her. An-mei recovered. Two years later the scar on her neck was pale and shiny, and she had completely forgotten her mother.

The story returns to the time when An-mei is nine, and Popo is dying. Her mother repeats an ancient tradition. She cuts a piece of flesh from her arm, puts it into a special soup, and feeds Popo, partly in one last attempt to save her life and partly out of respect for her. Popo dies a few hours later.

An-mei, now in the present, says that even then she could tell how much respect her mother had for Popo: “It is shou so deep it is in your bones.” Sometimes the only way to remember what is in your bones is to peel off everything until there is nothing else left.

Analysis

At the end of “The Joy Luck Club,” when Jing-mei protests that she doesn’t know anything about Suyuan, An-mei exclaims, “Your mother is in your bones!” This story shows how she has come to believe this.

“Scar” focuses on shou, respect for family. In this important Chinese tradition, respect is granted automatically; it does not have to be earned. The American-born daughters will not view respect for the family in the same manner as their mothers. This difference in the two cultures and generations creates conflict throughout the novel.

An-mei’s mother has disgraced her family. An-mei’s father died, and Chinese tradition forbids widows to remarry. For reasons we are not told in this story, however, she has remarried. Worse, she married a wealthy man who already had three wives.

Both Popo and Auntie teach An-mei and her brother that their mother is bad. The children think she is “thoughtless” and “a traitor to our ancestors.” Eventually An-mei believes them and considers herself unlucky to have such a mother. However, she thinks these thoughts while hiding from the portrait of her father, suggesting that she knew she was being disrespectful.

The story does not tell how An-mei’s mother knew Popo was dying. She returns to take care of her mother, even cutting flesh from her own arm for a special soup. She knew she could not save Popo’s life. The important thing was to demonstrate shou. An-mei realized that showing respect for Popo did not depend on whether Popo showed respect for her. She saw her mother’s sacrifice for Popo as a way of honoring her.

The title of the story, “Scar,” can be interpreted three ways. Most obvious is what An-mei calls her “smooth-neck scar,” the result of being burned by the soup. A second, an emotional scar, is suggested when An-mei says:

"In two years’ time, my scar became pale and shiny and I had no memory of my mother. That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain."

An-mei’s mother will have a scar as a result of the wound to her arm in addition to emotional scars from being separated from her children and disowned by her family. In another story we will see that she carries scars from other incidents in her life, too.

Popo is also scarred. From her point of view, disowning her daughter was the right thing to do. Even so, she has suffered. Her daughter is gone, and her family is in disgrace.

The Red Candle Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Lindo’s mother: never named

Huang Taitai: Lindo’s mother-in-law, mother of Tyan-yu

Tyan-yu: Lindo’s first husband

The village matchmaker: she arranges both the match and later, the wedding, between Lindo and Tyan-yu

The matchmaker’s servant: her mistake gives Lindo a chance to escape her marriage honorably

Another servant girl: she works for Huang Taitai and is kind to Lindo. When she becomes pregnant, Lindo helps her

Summary

Lindo Jong speaks to her daughter, Waverly, about the importance of keeping promises, comparing them to 24-carat gold. Then she talks about the promise her family made when they arranged the marriage between Lindo and Tyan-yu.

When she is 12, flooding destroys her family’s farm, forcing them to move away. Lindo moves in with the Huangs, where she is treated like a servant. Determined that Huang Taitai will not be able to say anything against her family, she makes the best of circumstances. For the next four years Tyan-yu goes out of his way to treat her badly, and Huang Taitai makes sure she is thoroughly trained in household chores. When Huang Taitai announces that she is ready to become a grandmother, preparations begin for the wedding.

Just before the ceremony, Lindo cries about being forced into this marriage. Then she notices the wind. She says, “I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind.” She looks into the mirror and realizes that she is like the wind—strong, pure, and able to think for herself. She promises herself she will respect her parents’ wishes but she will also never forget herself.

During the ceremony a red candle is lit at both ends and placed in a special holder. The matchmaker’s servant is to make sure neither end goes out. According to Chinese tradition, when the two ends burn together and flicker out, the husband and wife are joined in spirit forever.

After the wedding banquet the couple is escorted to their bedroom. Tyan-yu tells Lindo to sleep on the sofa. After he is asleep, Lindo walks into the courtyard. Through a window she sees the matchmaker’s servant sleepily tending the candle. A sudden crack of thunder frightens the servant, and she runs out. Lindo impulsively runs in and blows out her husband’s end of the candle. Then she returns to her room.

The next day, the matchmaker announces that the candle had burned from both ends. Lindo notices that her servant seems “shame-faced” and “mournful.”

Lindo is a model wife in front of Huang Taitai, but every night she sleeps on the sofa. One morning Huang Taitai slaps her and says she will not feed or clothe Lindo if she refuses to sleep with her son. Lindo understands that Tyan-yu has lied to his mother about why Lindo is not pregnant, and she begins to sleep in the same bed with him. She develops a protective, sisterly feeling toward him.

A few months later Huang Taitai again becomes angry that Lindo is not pregnant and insists that Lindo remain in bed until she is. A servant apologetically serves her a bad-tasting medicine every day. When Lindo still does not become pregnant, the matchmaker is summoned. She announces that Lindo has too much metal, that she is out of balance and cannot conceive. Huang Taitai happily reclaims the jewelry she gave to Lindo as wedding gifts; Lindo begins to plan her escape from this marriage.

Early in the morning on the day of the Festival of Pure Brightness, she cries out, claiming to have a bad dream. She tells everyone the ancestors are angry. They know that the marriage candle did not burn all the way through, as the matchmaker claimed; and they will begin the cycle of destruction if this marriage is not ended. Lindo also says that they have given three signs. First, a mole on Tyan-yu’s back will grow and kill him. Second, Lindo’s teeth will fall out one at a time. Third, one of the ancestors has impregnated a servant who is Tyan-yu’s true spiritual wife.

Huang Taitai finds the mole on Tyan-yu’s back and a tooth Lindo had lost four years earlier. Eventually she finds the pregnant servant and learns the truth about the wedding candle from the matchmaker’s servant. She releases Lindo from her marriage honorably.

The story ends in the present. Lindo tells Waverly, “I know what I’m worth,” as she describes buying 24-carat gold bracelets every few years. She still observes the Festival of Pure Brightness, however, by removing all her jewelry and remembering the promise she made not to forget herself.

Analysis

At the end of “The Joy Luck Club” Jing-mei says that she doesn’t know what to tell her half sisters about their mother. Lindo says, “Tell them stories of your family here. How she became success.” This story reveals that Lindo knows the meaning of success.

The Huang house serves as a metaphor for the family. Its placement high on a hillside represents their social status. When Lindo says, “they looked down on us,” she speaks both literally and figuratively. The river rocks of the house’s first level suggest humble origins. Each succeeding level grows more ostentatious until “someone, probably Huang Taitai” adds imperial pretensions. Inside, only the room guests see is lavished with “the look of wealth and old prestige”; the rest of the house is “crowded” and “uncomfortable.” Lindo also says the house has “a confused look” to it, a parallel to the confusion she will later manipulate as she convinces Huang Taitai to find another wife for Tyan-yu. This family is only concerned with appearances, foreshadowing their treatment of Lindo and providing her with an essential element of her escape. Their facade is no match for her integrity.

Lindo rescues the pregnant servant from tragedy by claiming she is Tyan-yu’s true wife. Pregnancy without marriage was very serious in China; it caused a “loss of face,” public embarrassment, not only to the woman and her family, but also to the entire village. History records acts of violence by the village against an unwed mother and her family that could easily result in death. Lindo is apparently the only one who has noticed the servant’s condition so far.

She adds a nice touch when she announces that the servant is really of imperial blood. That claim will appeal to Huang Taitai, who will gain status by including her in the family. The servant is astute enough to go along with it; Lindo relates ironically, “they forced her to tell the truth about her imperial ancestry.” The servant also cherishes her good fortune. Lindo says she orders the servants to sweep the graves of the ancestors, demonstrating shou, once a day instead of the traditional once a year.

Lindo is able to protect Tyan-yu, whom she has come to think of fondly; provide Huang Taitai with a grandson; repay the servant for her kindness; and keep her promises while extricating herself from this abusive situation. That constitutes success by any definition.

The Moon Lady Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Amah: Ying-ying’s nanny

Chang-o, the Moon Lady: in Chinese tradition, wife of the Master Archer

Hou Yi, the Master Archer: husband of Chang-o, associated with the sun

The Queen Mother of the Western Skies: also called Syi Wang Mu, associated with the yin principle

Mama and Baba: Ying-ying’s parents

Number Two and Number Three: Ying-ying’s younger half sisters

The family on the fishing boat: they rescue Ying-ying

Summary

Ying-ying, the narrator, speaks of her daughter, Lena, who does not hear or see Ying-ying because Ying-ying has kept her “true nature” hidden, “running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me.” She says that both she and Lena are lost, “unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.”

The story flashes back to 1918, when Ying-ying is four, and her family is preparing to celebrate the Moon Festival. They have rented a large boat on Tai Lake for the day, and a special ceremony will take place in the evening. Part of the ceremony is when Chang-o, the Moon Lady, grants a secret wish.

Ying-ying chases a dragonfly. Amah becomes upset that Ying-ying’s clothes and hair are a mess. Her mother tells her that boys can be active and run, but girls must be still, so the dragonfly will seek their shadow. Ying-ying had not noticed her shadow before; captivated, she plays with it until the family leaves for the lake.

The boat the family has rented is a floating pavilion with elaborate furnishings and decorations. Alone at the back of the boat at sunset, Ying-ying dangles her legs over the side and looks at her reflection. Noticing the large full moon, she twists around to tell the Moon Lady her secret wish and falls into the lake.

By chance a fishing boat catches her in its net. Her rescuers leave her on shore, expecting her family to find her there.

Ying-ying hides in some bushes until she hears music and an announcement that a play dramatizing the Moon Lady’s story is about to begin. The Moon Lady in silhouette tells her story from behind a screen that represents the moon. As the play ends, one of the actors tells the audience that the Moon Lady will grant one secret wish to each person for a small fee. The audience breaks up, and no one notices Ying-ying leave the bushes and run forward with her wish.

She runs all the way to the other side to talk to the Moon Lady, who has left the stage. The actor removes both costume and wig, and Ying-ying sees, just as she is stating her wish, that the Moon Lady is a man.

The story returns to the present, and Ying-ying says that for many years she couldn’t remember what she wished for that night or how her family found her. She is certain that the entire experience changed her. But as she has grown older, some of the memories of the day have returned, and today, once again the Moon Festival, she has finally remembered her wish: to be found.

Analysis

In “The Joy Luck Club,” when Jing-mei states she won’t know what to tell her half sisters about their mother, Ying-ying suggests telling them “what you know about her mind that has become your mind.” The theme of the mother’s way of thinking strongly influencing the daughter’s way of thinking is suggested at the beginning of this story; it becomes quite striking when all four of the stories about Ying-ying are put together. In this first story we see most clearly two motifs and the initial development of Ying-ying’s character.

The first motif, alluded to in “The Joy Luck Club,” is the Daoist concept of seeking balance: the yin and the yang. This motif dominates the novel. The Moon Lady sadly states, “For woman is yin, the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.” The yin, or female principle, refers to emotion, passivity, chaos, wetness, and the body; the yang, or male principle, is logic, action, discipline, dryness, and the mind. Combined, they produce life. Out of balance, they bring misery, as the story of the Moon Lady and Master Archer suggests.

Ying-ying’s name, which means “clear reflection,” represents an amalgam of the two concepts. She illustrates problems occurring when life is not in balance. Her fascination with her shadow represents her yin, her undisciplined emotions. Her fall into the lake immerses her in yin and separates her from the yang, the structure and order, of her family. She is too young to handle so much chaos. Her response, suggested in the opening paragraphs, is to go too far the other way, hiding her yin and living entirely in yang. The reader will see the consequences of such an approach in future stories.

The second motif is specific to this story alone: the shadow. Ying-ying mentions it in the second paragraph, saying that she kept her real personality hidden “like a small shadow.” As a child she is amazed by it, saying, “I loved my shadow, this dark side of me that had my same restless nature.” The shadow represents Ying-ying’s emotions—her active, spirited self—her yin.

After nearly drowning, fearing for her life among strangers and being unable to locate her family among the throngs on the lake, Ying-ying states, “I felt I was lost forever.” The next mention of her shadow parallels that emotional state. Her rescuers leave her on the dock, and she sees her shadow again, “shorter this time, shrunken and wild-looking.”

The play Ying-ying watches from the bushes is done in silhouette, shadows against a screen. In it she sees a statement of Chinese belief about the true nature of women and men. Taking action has caused Ying-ying to ruin her clothes and to fall off the boat. Taking action also causes the Moon Lady’s woes. Ying-ying says of the Moon Lady, “I understood her grief. In one small moment, we had both lost the world, and there was no way to get it back.”

Ying-ying is too young to understand that the Moon Lady is an actor. When the young man offers the granting of a wish for a donation, Ying-ying says, “nobody was listening to him, except my shadow and me in the bushes.” Thinking it is really Chang-o, she runs up “to the other side of the moon” with her wish. What looked in shadow like a beautiful woman turns out to be a man with “shrunken cheeks, a broad oily nose, large glaring teeth, ... red-stained eyes ... [and] a [tired] face.” This Chang-o will not grant her wish.

Her family is gone, Amah is gone, and she can’t even trust her own perceptions. Ying-ying’s world is as lost to her as the Moon Lady’s. She recalls that both her wish and being found by her family “seemed an illusion … a wish granted that could not be trusted.” The reader will see in the other stories that Ying-ying spends the rest of her life trying to understand what she can trust, not only in the external world, but also in herself.

The reader must reflect on Ying-ying’s statement, “I never believed my family found the same girl” in order to understand her opening remarks describing both herself and her daughter as “unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.” Even more pain lies in her future stories, ultimately leading her to keep her “true nature” safely hidden. This decision offers a measure of safety, but it also robs her of her energetic, trusting spirit. She remains tragically “out of balance” most of her life.

The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, Vignette Summary and Analysis

Summary

A mother tells her seven-year-old daughter not to ride her bicycle around the corner. When the daughter wants to know why, the mother says the daughter will fall and the mother will not see or hear her. When the daughter asks how her mother knows this will happen, her mother replies that it is written in The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, as are all the bad things that can happen to children who are away from their mothers. The daughter wants to see the book, but the mother says it is written in Chinese and she will not understand it. The daughter asks what the 26 bad things are in the book, but her mother does not answer; she sits and knits. The daughter repeats the question, and still her mother does not answer. The daughter decides her mother doesn’t know what they are and, further, doesn’t know anything at all. She jumps on her bike, pedals furiously toward the corner, and falls before she gets there.

Analysis

This vignette, like the first one, consists of archetypal characters. Readers should resist the temptation to identify the mother of this piece as Suyuan or Lindo, the daughter as Jing-mei or Waverly.

The young woman who brought the swan and all her good intentions to America now has the daughter she dreamed of. Her Chinese approach to motherhood insists upon obedience; however, this trait does not come easily to her American-born daughter. The mother wants to protect her daughter from harm, but the daughter takes risks finding things out for herself. The mother is quiet and calm, a typical Chinese woman; her daughter is loud and active, a typical American child. The mother wants her daughter to trust her; she says, “You must listen to me.” The daughter, though, wants to make up her own mind; she tells her mother, “You don’t know anything!” In her rebellion she discovers just the opposite.

All four stories in this section share this underlying conflict of the daughters’ desire for independence in conflict with the mothers’ guidance. We might call it, to paraphrase the title of an early 1960s sitcom, “Mother Knows Best.”

Rules of the Game Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Waverly Jong: Lindo’s only daughter and youngest child; narrator

Vincent and Winston Jong: Lindo’s older brothers

Lao Po: an old man in the park who helps Waverly learn chess

Summary

The adult Waverly looking back on her childhood tells this story. An incident with her mother and some salted plums teaches her “the art of invisible strength,” encapsuled in two sayings: “Bite back your tongue” and “Strongest wind cannot be seen.”

One year at a Christmas celebration at the First Chinese Baptist Church, Vincent gets a used chess set; Waverly selects a box of Life Savers; and Winston receives a kit for a model submarine. Once home, Waverly offers two of her Life Savers to substitute for the missing two chessmen if Vincent will let her play. The winner could eat both Life Savers.

When Waverly starts asking too many questions, Vincent hands her the manual and tells her to read the rules for herself. Her mother encourages this, saying that immigrants are often not told all the rules so that they don’t get ahead of the local people. Waverly begins to study chess seriously.

In addition to learning each piece and the different moves, she comes to understand the importance of strategy and the value of not revealing her plans. She becomes so involved in chess that she makes a chessboard, hangs it on the wall in her bedroom, and stares at it for hours, playing imaginary games. Soon her brothers no longer play with her.

Waverly begins playing chess in the playground at the end of the alley with an old man named Lao Po. At first she loses, but Lao Po teaches her both strategies and chess etiquette. On weekends small crowds gather as Waverly defeats opponent after opponent. Even Lindo comes to watch, sitting proudly on the bench while humbly declaring, “Is luck.”

Someone suggests that Waverly compete in area chess tournaments. Waverly says, “I desperately wanted to go, but I bit back my tongue.” Instead, she tells her mother she doesn’t want to. “They would have American rules. If I lost, I would bring shame on my family.” The technique works just as she wishes; Lindo insists that she try.

Waverly wins at that meet easily. As she continues to compete, Lindo encourages her all she can. The Chinese community also encourages her, and by the time she is nine, Waverly has become a national chess champion. On Saturday morning shopping expeditions, Lindo proudly tells everyone, “This my daughter Wave-ly Jong.”

One Saturday Waverly expresses embarrassment at Lindo’s pride. Her mother has nothing to say; the angry expression on her face says it all. Waverly runs away.

After a couple of hours, realizing she has nowhere else to go, she comes home. The family is having dinner, and Lindo has little to say. Waverly walks into her room, lies down, and tries to figure out what to do next.

Analysis

The title of this story, “Rules of the Game,” works on three levels. Most obviously it refers to Waverly’s learning the rules of chess. It also refers to Lindo’s observation that immigrants must learn the rules of their adopted country for themselves, because the locals will not share them. Finally, it refers to Waverly’s relationship with Lindo, which becomes a power struggle between the two. Learning the rules of chess takes up much of the plot of this story, but learning to get along with her mother will occupy the rest of the novel.

The theme of this story, “strongest wind cannot be seen” or “the greatest power lies in the unexpected,” also works on multiple levels. In the opening paragraphs Waverly says this way of thinking helped her win arguments, respect, and chess games. “I discovered that for the whole game one must gather invisible strengths and see the endgame before the game begins.” Waverly also learns to keep her strategy a secret. “A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use.” At her first chess tournament Waverly keeps her secrets so well that her opponent never sees defeat coming.

Waverly’s failure to “bite back [her] tongue,” issuing her challenge to Lindo even though she “knew it was a mistake to say anything more,” has disastrous consequences. Lindo cannot tolerate such disrespect as a mother and especially as a Chinese mother dealing with a daughter. She switches from “protective ally” to opponent. Waverly is about to learn that her mother does indeed know how to play chess, how to be the “strongest wind.”

Tan underscores the analogy of Waverly and Lindo’s relationship to a chess game subtly. Vincent explains that there are 16 chess pieces per player. When Waverly returns home after running away, she says, “I climbed the 16 steps to the door. . ..” The apartment thus becomes a metaphoric chess board on which Waverly and Lindo play out their game.

When Waverly runs away, she envisions Lindo walking through the streets looking for her, then going home to wait. She does not foresee that Lindo gathers invisible strengths. She is calmly eating supper with the family when Waverly appears at the door. Like a good chess player, Lindo does not reveal her strategy. She bites back her tongue and says only, “We not concerning this girl. This girl not have concerning for us.” No scolding, no punishment: Waverly has no idea what will happen next. The reader, however, may well suspect that she will have a hard time outmanipulating this opponent. From “The Red Candle” we already know that Lindo knows how to use secrets to her advantage.

Like the woman with the swan feather in the first vignette, Lindo wants a better life for her daughter. Waverly grows up in a warm, loving home in a supportive community. She does not appreciate what she has, though: She thinks her success is due entirely to her own efforts. While she certainly has dedicated a great deal of time and effort to the game, she has not been alone in her pursuit. She owes a debt to her brothers, who sleep in the living room and do her chores so she can study chess; to Lau Po, who has taught her his secrets; and to her mother, who has shown her love, pride, and support in many ways. Unfortunately, Waverly does not recognize this. Her comment, “If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn to play chess?” reveals self-centeredness, an attitude Lindo had not envisioned in her daughter. In the power struggle between the two, Lindo has the next move.

The Voice from the Wall Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Lena St. Clair: Ying-ying’s daughter, 10 years old at the time of this story

Clifford St. Clair: Ying-ying’s husband, Lena’s father

Teresa Sorci and Mrs. Sorci: neighbors in the St. Clairs’ apartment building. Teresa is about 12 years old. Her bedroom is next to Lena’s

Summary

The adult Lena narrates this story. As a child she wondered about “the death of a thousand cuts,” in which a condemned man is sliced away little by little until he dies. Her great-grandfather had once ordered someone to die in this manner, and the ghost of the executed man returned and killed him. “Either that,” she says, “or he died of influenza a week later.”

Lena imagines her great-grandfather’s last moments. The ghost appears, saying he thought the worst that could happen to him was this torturous execution. “But I was wrong,” he says. “The worst is on the other side,” meaning the other side of life—death. In her daydream the ghost then drags her great-grandfather from this world through the wall to the other side.

When Lena was five, she fell down the basement stairs. Ying-ying told her to stay out of the basement because an evil man who had lived there thousands of years would impregnate her and eat her family. After that Lena saw danger everywhere with her “Chinese eyes,” she says, “the part of me I got from my mother.”

Communication in the family is poor. Ying-ying warns Lena about dangers all around her, but Lena knows Ying-ying makes things up when challenged. Ying-ying’s English is poor and St. Clair’s Chinese worse, so communication between the parents is tenuous. Sometimes her father makes up what he thinks Ying-ying says. Lena also makes things up to her advantage when translating for either parent.

When Lena is 10, the family moves to North Beach, an Italian neighborhood of San Francisco. Lena adjusts easily to the noise and smells, but Ying-ying has trouble. The house is on a hill so steep that Ying-ying says a person’s life is always rolling backward. She tries to restore balance by rearranging the furniture several times. Her father dismissively claims, “Your mother is just practicing her nesting instincts.” A few days later, a new baby crib in Lena’s room suggests he may be right. Lena notices other, ominous signs, though, and she worries.

Lena hears her neighbors, the Sorcis, shouting at night. Then she hears what sounds like someone being killed with the death of a thousand cuts. The next night she hears it again. She meets the girl she believes to be the victim one day and is surprised that she looks so happy. Lena feels guilty for knowing the truth about her.

One day Suyuan and Canning Woo pick up Lena at school and take her to the hospital to visit her mother. Ying-ying’s baby was born with a severe birth defect and is dead. Ying-ying is incoherent, and St. Clair asks Lena to translate; but her words seem like insanity to Lena, so she makes up a translation.

Ying-ying enters a deep depression, unable to function. St. Clair tries to convince Lena and himself she is just tired, but Lena is frightened. When she hears the Sorcis fighting at night, she is comforted by thinking that someone else’s life is worse than hers.

One evening, however, the doorbell rings and the girl next door, Teresa, walks through the apartment to Lena’s bedroom and climbs out the window. Her mother has kicked her out in one of their arguments. Teresa wants to climb back into her bedroom via the fire escape. When Lena asks if Mrs. Sorci will be angry, Teresa casually says that they fight like this “all the time.”

Later that night Lena hears Teresa and her mother shouting at each other, but this time she also hears the love between them. She lies in her bed and cries, happy to have misjudged them.

That experience brings Lena hope. Her mother is still depressed, but Lena believes it will pass. She envisions a mother being sentenced to the death of a thousand cuts and being told, “It is the only way to save you.” The sword goes up and down, but no harm is done. The mother understands that she has already been through the worst possible. Then the daughter reaches out and pulls her mother back through the wall.

Analysis

The title “The Voice from the Wall” refers to three parts or voices. The first is the ghost returning from “the other side” for Lena’s great-grandfather. His voice threatens doom. The second voices belong to Teresa Sorci and her mother. They demonstrate love. Finally, Lena herself near the end of the story tries to bring her mother back from the other side of her depression. Hers is a voice of hope. The arguments between Teresa and her mother form an important part of the plot; both the image of the ghost and Lena’s struggle, while more subtle, underscore a theme of dealing with adversity.

When Tan sets the St. Clair family next to the Sorcis, she emphasizes their differences. The St. Clairs, Chinese-Americans, are quiet; the Sorcis, Italian-Americans, are loud. The St. Clairs are gentle with each other; the Sorcis are violent. The St. Clairs communicate almost by guessing; the Sorcis make their thoughts known not only to each other but also to the neighbors. The St. Clairs live in fantasy worlds: Clifford, by making up what he wants his wife to have said; Ying-ying, by retreating into her pain; Lena, by thinking she knows everything about Teresa Sorci. The Sorcis, on the other hand, live without illusions. Teresa tells Lena exactly what her mother is thinking, what she will do, and how she will react. She is also confident of her mother’s love. Strengths and weaknesses exist in both apartments.

The story of the ghost and Lena’s great-grandfather parallels the circumstances surrounding Lena and Ying-ying. Lena envisions the ghost “looking like a smashed vase hastily put back together” when he returns to exact his revenge. She compares her mother’s depression to that kind of death, saying Ying-ying’s fears “devoured her, piece by piece.” Lena’s world is as shattered as both the ghost and her mother. She describes Ying-ying’s despondency as “the worst possible thing,” in part because the stability of her family has been destroyed. While communication has never been a strength in the St. Clair household, Lena usually knew what to expect. Now her mother’s sorrow is a wall she can only dream of penetrating.

This story is one of the best in the novel at transcending the specific circumstances of Chinese women who raise American children. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, always complex, the St. Clair family represents every family at one time or another. Clifford St. Clair exemplifies not just an American who speaks minimal Chinese but also every husband who doesn’t try very hard to understand his wife. Ying-ying, in addition to being an immigrant who speaks English poorly, represents every wife who pleases her husband when he’s around and does what she wants when he’s gone. What child hasn’t taken advantage of a parent’s ignorance at one time or another? Lena manipulates the language weaknesses of both her parents to her advantage, one time to gain a metal lunch box, much later to escape a situation beyond her comprehension. The cultural aspects of the characters become secondary in these contexts.

Half and Half Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Rose Hsu Jordan: narrator of this story, daughter of An-mei and George, wife of Ted Jordan; a free-lance production assistant for graphic artists

Ted Jordan: Rose’s husband, a dermatologist

Mrs. Jordan: Ted’s mother

George Hsu: An-mei’s father

Janice, Ruth, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Bing Hsu: Rose’s sisters and brothers

Summary

Rose, the narrator, describes a “white leatherette Bible” her mother uses to prop up one leg of a crooked table. After spending more than 20 years on the floor, it is still “clean white.” As she looks at it, Rose wonders how she will tell An-mei that she and Ted are getting a divorce. She knows her mother will insist that she try to save her marriage.

At the beginning of Rose and Ted’s relationship, both mothers object to their dating because of the difference in race. Their parents’ opposition draws them closer together, and they are married just before Ted begins medical school.

Rose and Ted have an unusual relationship: He makes all the decisions because she wants him to. Ted becomes dissatisfied with this arrangement after losing a malpractice suit. He begins to insist that Rose choose. Finally, he tells her he wants a divorce. Rose is devastated.

Rose reflects on her mother’s faith, which An-mei mispronounces as “fate.” Rose wonders whether hope might be all that people can really have, and says the day she started wondering about this was the same day An-mei lost her faith in God.

The story flashes back to the day when Rose, 14, and her family go to the beach. When her father decides to go fishing and her sisters race down the beach, Rose watches her four brothers. The three older boys play together, but Bing, age 4, wanders down the beach. Rose warns him to stay away from the water.

Later Bing walks out on the reef where his father is fishing. As Rose watches, he falls into the water and is never seen again.

The next morning An-mei, who has never driven before, takes Rose back to the reef along with the white Bible, a thermos, and a teacup. An-mei holds the Bible and prays aloud in Chinese for the return of Bing, alive. At the end of her prayer, she waits. Three times she thinks she sees him, but each time “Bing” becomes a mass of seaweed.

An-mei puts the Bible down and takes the thermos and teacup to the edge of the water. She pours sweetened tea from the thermos into the teacup and throws it into the sea, and she adds a blue sapphire ring. For the next hour all they see is seaweed; then An-mei glances down the beach and sees Bing walking toward them. Rose does, too. Or they think they do. He lights a cigarette, and they realize he is a stranger.

Rose wants to leave, but An-mei is undaunted. She believes Bing is in a cave in the reef. She pulls a large inner tube out of the trunk of the car, ties the line from her husband’s fishing pole around it and throws it into the sea, holding on to the pole. She tells Rose that the inner tube will go where Bing is and help him out of the cave and back to them. Eventually the line snaps, and An-mei and Rose scramble to watch it travel across the cove. A wave forces it first against the wall and then into a cavern under the surface. The tube floats in and out several times until finally it comes out “torn and lifeless.” When that happens, An-mei abandons the search.

The story returns to the present. Rose never expected to find Bing that day, and she does not expect to save her marriage. Her mother insists that she must try and leaves Rose alone to think about why. Rose says she had known Bing was in danger and did nothing; she also knew her marriage was in danger and did nothing. In a moment of insight, she realizes that faith balances the loss caused by fate. She thinks that An-mei still pays attention to the loss of Bing. To confirm her suspicions, she takes the Bible out from under the table leg and opens it to find what An-mei wrote in it before she used it to prop up the table leg: Bing’s name appears in pencil on the page marked “Deaths.”

Analysis

This story returns to the motif of yin and yang, beginning with the title, a reference to the Daoist ideal of two halves balancing to make a whole. Rose and Ted’s relationship is an example of yin and yang gone awry. Instead of balancing the characteristics of both yin and yang in her personality, Rose is entirely yin, always the victim. Ted, on the other hand, is all yang, always the rescuer. Unhealthy though their relationship is, it works until Ted loses the malpractice suit and becomes the one in need. Rose, unaware of how hard he has taken the loss, does not help him. The balance destroyed, their marriage falls apart.

Balance is the key to the theme of this story, suggesting our lives are shaped both by what we control and what we don’t control. Echoing the theme of “The Joy Luck Club,” it suggests that hope is all people really have. Rose says of her own hope, “I was not denying any possibility, good or bad. I was just saying, If there is a choice, dear God or whatever you are, here’s where the odds should be placed.”

When An-mei returns with Rose to the site of Bing’s drowning, she has complete confidence one of her three plans will work. First she uses her Christian faith, holding the white Bible and praying to God.

When Bing does not appear, she turns to her Chinese tradition. Explaining that an ancestor had once stolen sacred water, she throws tea into the sea to “sweeten the temper of the Coiling Dragon.” She also throws in a blue sapphire ring, possibly her most valuable possession, a gift from her mother. When he still does not reappear, An-mei falls back on her nengkan, the powerful self-confidence that has served her family so well in the past. She is convinced her own efforts will succeed where Christian faith and Chinese tradition have failed: the inner tube attached to her husband’s fishing pole will go where Bing is and bring him back. But when the fishing line snaps, she no longer has the “illusion that somehow [she’s] in control.” She and Rose can only watch powerlessly and hopefully as the inner tube is smashed against the cove wall until it is destroyed.

“At that moment, and not until that moment, did she give up,” Rose says, adding, “It made me angry—so blindingly angry—that everything had failed us.”

The story concludes that fate consists of expectation—a positive force, yang—coupled with inattention—a negative force, yin. Those who lose something they love, as An-mei lost Bing and Rose lost Ted, must fill the void, must “pay attention to what [was] lost.” The family Bible’s clean condition tells the reader that An-mei notices it even though she pretends not to. It represents the absent Bing. Bing’s name written “in erasable pencil” in it suggests that An-mei, like Rose, now believes hope is the most a person can have. Rose must pay attention to her marriage, something she acknowledges she has not done, in order to restore the balance in her life. This is her fate.

Two Kinds Summary and Analysis

New Character:

Old Chong: Jing-mei’s deaf piano teacher

Summary

This story is narrated by the adult Jing-mei looking back on her childhood piano lessons.

When Jing-mei is nine, Suyuan wants her to be a prodigy like Lindo’s daughter and Shirley Temple. Jing-mei at first agrees, but after repeatedly failing to find her special talent, she quits trying.

A few months later Suyuan notices a young Chinese girl playing piano on The Ed Sullivan Show. Three days afterward she announces that she has made arrangements for Jing-mei to take piano lessons from Mr. Chong. Jing-mei quickly discovers he can’t tell when she is making mistakes because he is deaf. As long as she maintains the right tempo, “Old Chong” thinks she is doing well.

The adult Jing-mei interrupts here to observe, “Maybe I never really gave myself a chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at that young age. But I was…determined not to try.”

After about a year of half-hearted effort, Jing-mei enters a talent competition. Instead of memorizing the music in preparation, however, she practices her fancy curtsy. The night of the recital, in front of an audience that includes all the Joy Luck Club aunties and uncles, Jing-mei plays very badly. She gets the fancy curtsy right, but the audience is silent, except for Old Chong, who shouts, “Bravo! Bravo! Well done!” Jing-mei sees Suyuan’s “stricken face” in the audience and tries not to cry as she sits down, ashamed.

She thinks her piano lessons are behind her, but the next afternoon, Suyuan reminds her it’s time to practice. When she refuses, they argue. Jing-mei shouts that she wishes she weren’t Suyuan’s daughter. She wishes she were dead, like Suyuan’s two daughters in China. Suyuan, stunned, leaves the room. The piano lessons are over.

The adult Jing-mei comments that she disappointed her mother again and again in later years when she insisted on the right to be less than her best. She finds her old recital piece in the piano bench and begins to play it. Then she notices the piece on the page opposite, “Perfectly Contented.” After she plays through both pieces, she realizes they are “two halves of the same song.”

Analysis

Hope was the basis for founding the original Joy Luck Club in Kweilin. At the end of “The Joy Luck Club,” Jing-mei observes that the aunties “see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.” Hope is both theme and motif in this story. The opening paragraphs remind the reader of how much Suyuan lost in China, emphasizing her dreams for a new life in America. These ambitions extend to Jing-mei as well, connecting mother and daughter.

Suyuan’s declaration to Jing-mei, “You can be best anything,” reveals her appreciation of the opportunities available in America. Jing-mei shares her mother’s enthusiasm at first, believing that her prodigy side, symbolized by her Peter Pan haircut, will be perfect. As she fails test after test, however, she says, “I hated . . . the raised hopes and failed expectations.” Frustrated, she quits trying, and eventually so does her mother. Jing-mei says, “At last she was beginning to give up hope.” The young Chinese piano player on The Ed Sullivan Show, however, changed that.

The argument about continuing piano lessons lasts until Jing-mei mentions Suyuan’s lost twins. The reader will recall from “The Joy Luck Club” that Suyuan never stopped hoping to see her daughters again. Jing-mei’s childish anger creates an image greater than Suyuan can bear: “her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.” Ironically, Jing-mei wonders later why her mother had given up hope, as the piano sits in the living room, its lid shut against “dust, my misery, and her dreams.” She never connects the hopes for one daughter with the hope of seeing the other two.

Jing-mei’s observation that “Pleading Child” and “Perfectly Contented” are “two halves of the same song” returns the reader to the motif of yin and yang that runs throughout the novel. “Pleading Child” was the “simple, moody” piece from the recital, which now looks “more difficult than I remembered.” “Perfectly Contented” is lighter, longer, faster, and just as easy. The titles suggest Jing-mei’s attitude as a child and as an adult. Not until later in the novel will she realize where her refusal to strive for the best has led her.

American Translation, Vignette Summary and Analysis

Summary

The mother insists her adult daughter move the mirrored armoire at the foot of her bed. She says her daughter’s “marriage happiness” will reflect off the mirror and turn to unhappiness. The daughter, annoyed, says there is no other place in the bedroom of the new condominium to put it. It will have to stay where it is.

The mother pulls a mirror, her housewarming present, out of a used Macy’s shopping bag. She tells her daughter to mount this mirror above the head of the bed, across from the other mirror, so the reflections will “multiply your peach-blossom luck.”

When the daughter asks what peach-blossom luck is, the mother only smiles mischievously, tells her to look in the mirror, and asks, “Am I not right? In this mirror is my future grandchild, already sitting on my lap next spring.” The daughter looks and—yes, there it is!—her reflection.

Analysis

The mother in this vignette invokes the Chinese tradition of feng shui, which holds that locations can be lucky or unlucky. Feng shui influences Chinese and Chinese American architectural styles, building locations, and even furniture arrangement. Telling her daughter to move the mirror is one more way this mother tries to ensure her daughter’s happiness.

The daughter does not understand the theories of feng shui or her mother’s purpose in predicting trouble, nor does she care. She knows what she wants; the armoire will stay where it is. The mother compromises with the second mirror and defines “peach-blossom luck,” children, as a desirable trait in a marriage.

Both “The Joy Luck Club” and “Two Kinds” point to a hope connecting generations. One of the characteristics of contemporary American society has been couples who delay starting a family or who decide not to have children at all. The daughter in this vignette has no children yet, and her mother encourages her to start a family. Otherwise, there may be no generation to pass hope on to.

This vignette introduces four stories told by the daughters, now adults in their thirties. Like the daughter who looks into the mirror, the daughters in these stories see and do not see what their mothers try to show them.

Rice Husband Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Harold Livotny: Lena’s husband, an architect

Arnold Reisman: a neighbor who was mean to Lena when they were children

Summary

Ying-ying is visiting Lena, 36, and her husband, Harold, in their new home in Woodside. Lena worries that Ying-ying will see how precarious their marriage is.

The story flashes back to when Lena was eight. To encourage her to finish her food, Ying-ying told her that her future husband would have a pock mark on his face for every piece of rice she did not eat. Lena immediately thought of Arnold, a neighbor who had small marks about the size of grains of rice on his face and was mean to her. She was frightened she would have to marry him. At Sunday school later that week Lena saw a film about people with leprosy. She thought her mother would say their future spouses had left several meals unfinished. She tried to kill Arnold by not finishing her food, so she wouldn’t have to marry him.

Five years later her father read in the paper one morning that Arnold had died of complications from a case of measles he’d had about the time Lena refused to finish her food. Lena felt responsible for his death, and that night she ate ice cream until she vomited.

The story returns to the present, with Lena observing that people get what they deserve. As evidence she cites her husband, Harold, whom she met eight years earlier at the architectural firm where both worked. They split the bill for working lunches in half, even though Lena’s share was usually less than Harold’s. Later they did the same when they met secretly for dinner. Lena didn’t mind the unfairness.

Later she convinced Harold to start his own firm and offered to help finance it. He would not accept money from her under any business arrangement; instead, he invited her to move in with him and pay him $500 a month rent. Lena accepted, thrilled that they would be living together.

Both of them quit their jobs to work at this new business. Lena encouraged Harold not to give up and came up with some unusual ideas for restaurant designs. Harold used her ideas and became successful. The firm now employs 12 people, one of them Lena. Harold will not promote her, even though she is very good, saying the other employees will think the promotion is just because they are married. Lena feels that trying to keep things equal with Harold is not working any more.

The story returns to the present. Ying-ying looks at a tally of expenses on the refrigerator door, and Lena explains that they split expenses 50-50. Ying-ying notices Harold has put “ice cream” on his list and points out that Lena has never eaten it since Arnold died. She has always paid for half of it, though.

Lena shows Ying-ying to the guest room, a plain room decorated in Harold’s taste. By the bed an unsteady table has a vase of freesias on it. Lena warns Ying-ying about it, then goes downstairs and marks the ice cream off the refrigerator list. She and Harold argue about the way they split expenses until Lena hears the vase in the guest room fall and break. She goes upstairs and sees that the table has collapsed. Lena tells her mother she knew it would happen, and Ying-ying asks her why she didn’t prevent it.

Analysis

Ying-ying’s closing words to Lena, “Then why you don’t stop it?” complete a motif that runs through this story, chunwang chihan. The phrase literally means, “If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold.” Figuratively it suggests cause-and-effect relationships for everything that happens.

Referring to events in “The Voice from the Wall,” Lena relates that Ying-ying knew her baby would be born dead, saying the family’s home was built on a hill that was too steep. A Western reader might not see the feng shui cause and effect Ying-ying did, but would see clearly the relationship between Clifford St. Clair’s bacon-and-egg breakfasts and his heart attack and death. The motif resurfaces when Ying-ying encourages Lena to eat by telling her leftover food will cause pock marks on her future husband’s face. At first Lena eats, but later she decides against it. With the logic of an eight-year-old, she thinks this will kill Arnold, a mean neighbor she is afraid of having to marry. When the events surrounding Arnold’s subsequent death appear to indicate she was right, she feels guilty and gorges herself on ice cream. The causes and effects exist only in the minds of the participants but are no less real for it.

Ying-ying criticizes Harold’s table with “Chunwang chihan,” wondering what to do with a table too unsteady for anything but a small vase of flowers. When the table falls, she points out that when the cause is obvious, the effect should be prevented.

This motif underscores the character development of both Harold and Lena. When Ying-ying tells Harold that Lena has “become so thin…you cannot see her,” she is commenting on their marriage. She sees clearly what Lena denies: Harold abuses Lena’s generosity and love when he insists that she pay for half of everything. “As long as we keep the money thing separate,” he insists, “we’ll always be sure of our love for each other.” He uses their financial arrangement to ensure he has his way in every major decision. This pattern is so entrenched in their relationship that Lena does not even know how to articulate it at the end of the story.

Harold thinks Lena is talking about the cat when she brings up the subject of changing the way they manage household expenses. After all, she has gone along with everything up to now. At first it was just meals. Later he didn’t want to accept her financial support for his firm on any businesslike basis such as a loan, which would benefit both equally. Instead, he exploited her by asking her to move in with him so he could start his business with her rent money. He now owns a very successful firm with 12 full-time employees, and Lena has nothing to show for her investment.

This pattern of Harold taking advantage of Lena continued into their marriage. It is present in their prenuptial agreement, in Harold’s refusal to promote Lena even though she deserves it, in the uninviting style of their home, in their vacation plans, and in their day-to-day expenses. Lena has gone along with it, even though she recognizes that something is wrong. She values her contribution too little, afraid Harold might one day see her “as a sham of a woman.” She considers herself lucky that Harold loves her but does not consider that Harold is lucky she loves him.

The wobbly table in the guest room symbolizes the couple. Lena wonders why Harold is proud of its clumsy design. The fragile legs will support their marble burden only as long as nothing jars the table. Similarly, Harold and Lena have a clumsy marriage, Lena often not saying what she is thinking, Harold pretty much getting whatever he wants. It is uneven and unfair, and something as small as a cat or a box of ice cream can shatter the assumptions that support it.

Four Directions Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Mr. Rory: Waverly’s hairdresser

Marlene Ferber: Waverly’s friend

Marvin Chen: Waverly’s first husband

Shoshana: Waverly’s and Marvin’s daughter

Rich Schields: Waverly’s fiancé, a tax attorney

Lisa Lum: Vincent Jong’s girlfriend

Summary

Waverly, age 36, describes meeting her mother for lunch in an unsuccessful bid to tell her she’s marrying Rich Schields. Lindo has never met him, and she changes the subject whenever Waverly mentions him. Waverly takes Lindo to her cluttered apartment to show off a mink jacket, Rich’s Christmas gift. Lindo criticizes its poor quality and refuses to acknowledge the unmistakable signs that Rich lives there.

Waverly comments that Lindo “knows how to hit a nerve.” The first time it happened, she was 10 and a chess champion. They argued in the middle of a busy street and didn’t speak to each other for several days afterwards. Waverly said she wouldn’t play chess again. After another argument Waverly came down with chicken pox.

Lindo returned to her usual self during her daughter’s illness. Waverly returned to chess, but she noticed that Lindo didn’t pay as much attention to her success as she had before. She began to lose more often. At 14, she quit.

Waverly thinks Lindo will criticize Rich a little at a time until it ruins her feelings for him, as she did with Marvin, Shoshana’s father. Waverly doesn’t want her mother to find flaws in Rich.

Finally, she figures out how to arrange for Rich to meet her parents. They visit Suyuan and Canning Woo one Sunday afternoon in time to be invited to stay for dinner. When she writes her thank-you note, she adds, “Rich said it was the best Chinese food he has ever tasted.” Shortly afterward, Lindo invites Waverly to bring “a friend” for a birthday dinner for her father.

When they arrive, she notices Lindo’s “forced smile” as she meets Rich. In the kitchen later Lindo remarks that Rich has “spots on his face” when asked what she thinks. At dinner Rich commits one error after another without even realizing it; at home he tells Waverly that he thinks everything went well.

The next day she drives back to her parents’, determined both to announce her engagement and to confront Lindo. Her mother is sleeping on the sofa and looks dead. Waverly starts crying, causing Lindo to wake up, afraid something has happened. Waverly announces she’s going to marry Rich and awaits Lindo’s criticism.

To Waverly’s surprise, her mother already knows they’re getting married. Waverly stammers that she knows Lindo doesn’t like Rich. Lindo is hurt Waverly thinks she would be so devious and accuses Waverly of being devious. Waverly, confused, says she isn’t sure what’s inside her. Half of her, Lindo explains, comes from her father’s Cantonese family. The other half is from her mother’s clan in Taiyuan. They have a pleasant conversation until Waverly confuses Taiyuan with Taiwan. To her they sound alike, but Lindo indignantly insists they are completely different.

Waverly doesn’t understand the point, but she learns something about herself. She sees that the little girl who ran away from her mother years ago has been hiding. When she finally lets down her guard a little, she sees “an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in.”

The story shifts to the present. Waverly says she and Rich will postpone their wedding so they can honeymoon in China in October. Lindo mentions she plans to go back then, too, but not with them. Waverly knows Lindo really would like to travel with them. She knows it would be a disaster, but she also thinks it’s a good idea.

Analysis

Tan returns to the motif of chess maneuvers to characterize the relationship between Waverly and Lindo. The story contains several allusions to chess, beginning with the argument on Stockton Street described from Lindo’s point of view in “Rules of the Game” and from Waverly’s perspective in this story. When Lindo does not speak to Waverly for a few days, Waverly recognizes a stratagem. Rather than responding in anger and falling into a trap, she, too, refuses to speak.

After a few days Waverly decides the next move is hers, and she stops playing chess. She even chooses “to sacrifice a tournament,” as she might strategically give up a chess piece. When the tournament comes and goes and Lindo still does not speak, Waverly’s next ploy is “to pretend to let her win” by announcing she wants to resume chess. She is startled when Lindo says “no.” In a scene reminiscent of the ending of “Rules of the Game,” she retreats to her bedroom and stares at her chessboard, trying to “undo this terrible mess.”

Chicken pox returns the mother/daughter relationship to a semblance of normalcy. Waverly returns to competitive chess, but Lindo no longer offers her support. Waverly loses a tournament and reports that Lindo looked satisfied, “as if it had happened because she had devised this strategy.”

As an adult, Waverly continues manipulating circumstances to her advantage. When Lindo refuses to react to the obvious signs that Rich lives with her, she devises a gambit to get her to meet him. It succeeds: after Waverly sends a thank-you note to Lindo’s arch-rival Suyuan, telling her Rich said it was the best Chinese food he had ever eaten, Lindo invites Waverly to bring a friend over for dinner. Waverly knew Lindo would want to outdo Suyuan.

After the dinner, Waverly says, “In her hands I always became the pawn….And she was the queen.” She visits her parents to announce her engagement and ends up talking with Lindo about her family background. At the end, she says, they have reached “a stalemate.” Neither dominates the other.

Tan offers hope for reconciliation between the women when Waverly acknowledges that the problems in her relationship with Lindo are at least partly of her own making. Waverly also sees that Lindo has not given up on her. The closing image, of Waverly, Rich, and Lindo flying to China together, “moving West to reach the East,” evokes Jing-mei’s observation in “The Joy Luck Club” that the East is “where things begin.” In the next section “Double Face” reveals Lindo’s attitude toward a new relationship with her daughter.

Without Wood Summary and Analysis

New Character:

Old Mr. Chou: the Chinese equivalent of the Sandman

Summary

When Rose was little, she had bad dreams. In one of them, she fell through a hole in Old Mr. Chou’s floor into a garden. When he shouted at her, she began to run through fields of surrealistic flowers until she came upon sandboxes, each containing a new doll. An-mei told Old Mr. Chou that she knew which one Rose would select, so Rose deliberately chose a different one. An-mei shouted, “Stop her!” and Rose ran off, followed by Old Mr. Chou, who told her she should listen to her mother. When Rose told her the dream, An-mei laughed and said Rose should ignore Old Mr. Chou and just listen to her; Rose protests that even Old Mr. Chou listens to her.

The story jumps to the present. Rose meets An-mei at a funeral one month after telling her that she and Ted are getting a divorce. An-mei talks during most of the service, telling Rose she is too thin, asking her if she has money, asking her why Ted has sent a check, deciding that Ted “is doing monkey business with someone else.” Rose disagrees with the last statement. An-mei asks why Rose can talk to a psychiatrist, but not to her, about her problems. She says a mother knows what is inside her children and that psychiatrists “only make you hulihudu, make you see heimongmong.” The English equivalents are “confused” and “dark fog.” The terms mean the sensation of being frightened and in the dark while trying to find the way. That is how she has felt lately, because she has been talking to everyone but Ted.

Ted sends divorce papers for her to sign and a check to help her out until the settlement. Rose is hurt because the pen he used to write the check was her gift to him last Christmas. He had promised he would only use it for “important things.” Rose doesn’t know what to do, so she puts the papers and the check “in a drawer where I kept store coupons which I never threw away and which I never used either.”

Just before she pulls the papers out of the drawer to sign them, she thinks about how much she loves her house. She remembers that Ted used to pay careful attention to the garden. As she looks at it through a window, she notices that the garden has been neglected and wonders when Ted stopped working in it. She remembers a fortune she once read from a cookie: “When a husband stops paying attention to the garden, he’s thinking of pulling up roots.”

Three days later Ted calls. He is annoyed that Rose hasn’t cashed his check or signed the papers and threatens to have them formally served. He wants the house; he wants to get remarried. Rose is stunned. She asks Ted to come over the next day, promising him the papers.

The next day she shows him the overgrown garden and says she likes it that way. She gives him his papers, and he offers to let her live in the house 30 days until she finds someplace else to live. Rose says she’s staying in the house and that her lawyer will be serving him with papers. She has not signed his.

Rose tells Ted, “You can’t just pull me out of your life and throw me away.” She sees by his expression that he is hulihudu and that her words have power. That night she dreams that she is in the garden with Old Mr. Chou and her mother. It is foggy, and they are planting something in the planter boxes. When she walks closer, she can see freshly planted weeds “below the heimongmong, all along the ground…spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.”

Analysis

Rose, who never had to make a decision before, now finds herself facing several. Amy Tan uses the situation to develop two intertwining themes. The first might be stated simply as “Listen to your mother.” The second theme affirms the value of Chinese thinking in a multicultural society. The common denominator for the themes is An-mei.

The title refers to the Chinese belief that people consisted of fire, water, earth, metal, and wood. An imbalance of even one element could have serious consequences, as suggested in “The Red Candle,” when the matchmaker says Lindo was unable to conceive because she had too much metal. In “The Joy Luck Club” Jing-mei says that An-mei had too little wood and was therefore unable to think for herself. In this story An-mei states that Rose has no wood, and, in an irony apparent only to the reader, confides that she herself almost became that way once. An-mei uses the analogy of a tree and a weed to explain the difference between having and not having wood and promises that a girl who listens to her mother will be strong.

“I used to believe everything my mother said,” Rose says in the opening line of the story, “even when I didn’t know what she meant.” The children of immigrant parents usually reject their parents’ culture and adopt the ways of the new country as they try to assimilate, and Rose fits the pattern. Forced to choose between American ways and Chinese ways, Rose chooses the American ways almost every time. “It was only later that I discovered there was a serious flaw with the American version,” Rose asserts. “There were too many choices, so it was easy to get confused and pick the wrong thing.” Again Rose fits the pattern of immigrants’ children not appreciating their parents’ culture until they are older.

An-mei suspects Ted is having an affair when she learns he has sent Rose a check. Rose finds the idea laughable at the time, but later she discovers her mother was right. At that point she abandons her American ideas in favor of her mother’s Chinese ideas, decides she will speak to Ted, and invites him over. She retrieves the divorce papers from the drawer where she puts things she can’t decide about, and finds her voice: “You can’t just pull me out of your life and throw me away.”

Rose’s remark alludes to An-mei’s analogy. She will not allow Ted to treat her like a weed. She has listened to her mother and has wood now. Ted is confused, hulihudu, by the power of her words; and Rose is pleased. Once the power of her mother’s words had shaped her life, but Rose finally has power in words of her own. The incident underscores the twin themes.

The weeds in the garden represent Rose. An-mei’s earlier description of weeds “running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away” foreshadows Ted’s intentions. Rose notices some weeds that have worked their way into cracks in the patio and under loose shingles and can’t be pulled out without structural damage. The image suggests that Rose herself won’t be discarded easily. She tells Ted she likes the garden overgrown and wild. Her defiance suggests her new strength.

The fog of the garden that afternoon parallels the hulihudu, confusion, Rose sees in Ted’s face after this announcement. It returns in Rose’s final dream, where planter boxes replace sandboxes and lovingly tended weeds “below the heimongmong” replace the dolls of her first dream. This image suggests that Rose can accept herself as she is.

 Best Quality Summary and Analysis

Summary

Jing-mei, the narrator, describes a pendant necklace Suyuan gave her a few weeks before her death. Called a “life’s importance,” the pendant is an elaborately carved piece of white and green jade about the size of her little finger. She believes the carvings symbolize her mother’s wishes for her, but she doesn’t know what they are, and no one else can tell her.

The story flashes back to the night her mother gave her the pendant. Suyuan had invited the Jongs over to celebrate Chinese New Year, so earlier in the day she and Jing-mei went shopping for crabs. As Jing-mei selects the tenth crab, she accidentally causes another crab to lose a leg. The manager sees them and forces them to buy the extra crab.

At dinner each person takes the best of the crabs left, until the platter reaches Jing-mei. She starts to take the one with the missing leg, offering the better one to her mother. Suyuan insists that Jing-mei take the good one. As the others eat, Suyuan quietly takes her crab into the kitchen.

The dinner conversation is friendly and lively until Waverly asks Jing-mei if she isn’t afraid to have her

hair cut by a gay beautician. After more insults, Jing-mei decides to embarrass Waverly. She asks when Waverly’s firm will pay for some free-lance copywriting she had done more than a month ago. Everyone grows quiet. Waverly tells June that her writing was not good enough. Jing-mei stammers that of course revision is at no cost. Waverly says that Jing-mei’s work is unsophisticated and has no style. She mocks it, repeating it as a television announcer would, and everyone laughs. Jing-mei picks up a couple of plates, trying not to cry.

After everyone has left, Suyuan comes into the kitchen and starts to make tea as Jing-mei puts away the dishes. When Jing-mei asks why Suyuan didn’t eat her crab, Suyuan answers that it was a bad crab. What if someone else had chosen it? she wonders. Suyuan smiles. “Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everybody else want best quality. You thinking different.” It sounds like a compliment.

Jing-mei asks Suyuan why she didn’t use the new dishes, her gift five years ago. Suyuan replies she forgot she had them. Then, as if she had just remembered, she gives Jing-mei the necklace she is wearing. When Jing-mei protests, Suyuan insists, saying she had meant to give it to her long ago. Jing-mei accuses Suyuan of giving her the necklace because of the scene with Waverly. Suyuan dismisses the idea, saying Waverly is like a crab that always walks sideways or crooked. Jing-mei, she says, goes a different way.

Analysis

“Best Quality” moves easily between discussion of best quality things and best quality people, emphasizing that life’s importance lies in showing respect to others and to oneself.

Suyuan buys crab, a delicacy, to celebrate the Chinese New Year. She wants to offer her guests the best, so when she is forced to purchase the one with the missing leg, she considers it an extra, not one of the ten she needs. She is not expecting Shoshana, a child, to eat crab. Waverly, however, gives the biggest and best crab to her daughter, even though she knows Shoshana doesn’t like it. Like every other mother, Waverly wants her daughter to have the best.

As the platter goes around, the guests each choose the best for themselves except Jing-mei, who offers the better one to her mother. Suyuan, like Waverly, insists that her daughter have the best, even though she knows Jing-mei doesn’t care for crab and even though she believes the crab she gives herself is not fit to eat. Both Jing-mei and Suyuan offer the best to others and are willing to take second-best for themselves.

Suyuan says of the pendant she gives Jing-mei, “Not so good, this jade.” She offers hope for its future, though, saying it will become greener if Jing-mei wears it every day. Jade symbolizes purity, in this case purity of intention: Mother and daughter share a willingness to offer their best to others, which is more important than having the best quality possessions.

Some critics have suggested that Suyuan’s words to Jing-mei in the kitchen are in the nature of a gentle scolding, that Jing-mei has never wanted the best for herself, a pattern introduced in “Two Kinds” when she refused to develop her musical talent. The necklace suggests that Suyuan wants her daughter to remember that she is “still worth something.” The gift follows Jing-mei’s vision of herself as a success only at small things. No doubt her mother’s vote of confidence is welcome.

Several critics have commented on the final scene in this story, in which Jing-mei takes her mother’s place in the kitchen, symbolically becoming her mother. Throughout literature daughters have identified with their mothers hesitantly or uncertainly. Jing-mei, however, is quite comfortable in assuming some of her mother’s role, suggesting that she has found strength in her mother’s confidence and love. She will need that strength when she travels to China to tell her sisters about Suyuan.

Queen Mother of the Western Skies, Vignette Summary and Analysis

Summary

A grandmother plays with her infant granddaughter on her lap. She says she doesn’t know which is better, innocence or safety. She was once innocent and laughed “for no reason” but gave up that foolishness to protect herself. She taught her daughter to do the same. Now she wonders if she did the right thing.

The baby laughs. The grandmother pretends the baby is Syi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the Western Skies, who has already lived many lifetimes and knows the answer. She listens, and thanks the baby for her advice. She says the baby must teach its mother, the grandmother’s daughter, “how to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”

Analysis

This vignette completes the cycle. In the first vignette, a young woman travels to America with a swan and dreams. In the second, the woman, now the mother of a young child, struggles to raise her. In the third, her daughter is an adult, but she still tries to help her. In this vignette the woman is a grandmother. She reflects on her life and wonders whether she has done the best she could for her daughter. She decides that the best way to raise children is to show them the evils of the world but to maintain the hope that life can be good despite evil.

Maintaining hope in the face of the realities of life is one of the most important themes of this novel.

Magpies Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Wu Tsing: An-mei’s mother’s second husband, a wealthy merchant in Tientsin

Yan Chang: An-mei’s mother’s personal servant

First Wife: Wu Tsing’s official wife, mother of two daughters. She is addicted to opium

Second Wife: Wu Tsing’s concubine. She dominates the other women in the household

Third Wife: Wu Tsing’s concubine. She has three daughters

Fifth Wife: Wu Tsing’s most recent concubine. She is very young

Syaudi: son of Wu Tsing and An-mei’s mother. Second Wife claims him as her own

Summary

An-mei, the narrator, talks about Rose’s divorce. Rose complains that she has no choice in the matter, but An-mei says refusing to make an effort is a choice. An-mei’s Chinese upbringing trained her to want nothing for herself. She tried to raise Rose differently, but “she came out the same way!” An-mei wonders if it’s just because they’re all women.

The story flashes back to when An-mei is nine, and her mother returns to the family home in Ningpo. She is not welcome. She mourns the death of her mother, Popo, even though Popo had disowned her years earlier. After Popo’s funeral, she prepares to leave. An-mei leaves with her.

During the long trip to Wu Tsing’s, An-mei’s mother points out that An-mei will have a new home, new family, and many new things. Every night An-mei falls asleep snuggled next to her mother. She feels very comfortable.

When Wu Tsing and the other wives return, everything changes. Yan Chang tells An-mei the circumstances allowing Second Wife to manipulate Wu Tsing easily. She also relates why An-mei’s mother married him. These revelations cause An-mei to view the household dynamic from an adult perspective. When her mother later commits suicide, An-mei understands both the causes and the intended effect. She gains the life her mother wanted for her and Syaudi, her son.

The story returns to the present. An-mei understands confusion and powerlessness, but she refuses to submit. A village that fought off birds that had destroyed their crops for generations represents that courage to her.

Analysis

An-mei’s story concludes with her observation that women have more choices in America today than they had in China in her childhood. An-mei herself participates in the transition between the two. She stops submitting, swallowing her tears, and begins asserting herself, shouting.

Amy Tan uses both swallowing tears and shouting as motifs to underscore this progression. Early in the story An-mei’s mother tells her daughter how disappointed she was when Popo told her it was time to grow up, to stop shouting, playing, and crying. She learned that women should swallow their tears so they don’t let their sorrow cause others to be happy. Thus, women were denied the expression of even basic emotions. Men could shout, as An-mei’s uncle does; but women were not permitted to respond in kind. An-mei’s mother kneels before him instead, “crying with her mouth closed,” completely powerless. An-mei’s decision to leave with her mother is a silent defiance of his wishes.

When Wu Tsing acknowledges his debt to her mother, An-mei sees another opportunity to assert herself. She begins to shout, noisily claiming power. Years later the story of the villagers shouting to defeat the predatory birds causes her to shout for joy. The transition from vulnerability to strength is complete.

In addition to these two motifs, three symbols in this story deserve mention. An-mei describes the elaborate European clock in her mother’s room. The figures go through their routines when the clock chimes the hour. At first An-mei is fascinated by its intricacy. Later it becomes a nuisance, keeping her awake at night. Eventually she learns to ignore it and discovers that she has developed the ability to disregard “something meaningless calling to me.” Recognizing and resisting the meaningless things is a measure of An-mei’s developing ability to recognize what is true.

An-mei learns the lesson a second time when Second Wife gives her the necklace. Once her mother demonstrates that it is glass, she sees it as “something meaningless.” Once we learn of Second Wife’s earlier treachery, the purpose of the necklace becomes evident: to buy An-mei’s loyalty. The ring of watery blue sapphire that An-mei’s mother gives her at the end of this lesson is the same ring An-mei throws into the cove to bring back Bing in “Half and Half.”

The final symbol serves as a foreshadowing. When An-mei’s mother gives her a Western outfit to wear from the steamer to Wu Tsing’s home, nothing fits. Tan points especially to the white shoes, which have to be stuffed with paper before An-mei can wear them. She mentions twice that she has trouble walking in these shoes, a suggestion that she will have difficulty following in her mother’s footsteps in the household of Wu Tsing. Her efforts to assert herself are the result of her mother’s actions, but the opposite of them as well. She does not swallow her tears; she shouts.

Tan frames the story of An-mei’s childhood with reference to Rose and her divorce, an ongoing plot from “Half and Half” and “Without Wood.” Rose believes she has no choices, but Rose does not know what it means to have no choices. An-mei does, and she shouts for joy that the change has come.

Waiting Between the Trees Summary and Analysis

New Character:

Ying-ying’s first husband: never named, Ying-ying called him “Uncle” when she first met him. He is murdered by a mistress

Summary

Ying-ying, the narrator, loves her daughter Lena, but they have never been close. She wants to tell her daughter everything about her life now in an effort to rescue Lena from herself.

The story flashes back to Ying-ying’s childhood. She says she was a wild, stubborn, and arrogant girl from a wealthy family. She met a coarse, drunken man the night her youngest aunt was married. The day after her aunt’s wedding, she saw a sign that convinced her she would marry him.

As they sat in a boat on Tai Lake not long after their marriage, Ying-ying fell in love with him and began to do everything just for him. She knew she was pregnant with a boy the night it happened, and she was very happy.

She began to worry when she noticed her husband taking more frequent and longer business trips, especially after she was pregnant. Eventually her youngest aunt told her he was living with an opera singer in the North. Even later she learned there had been many other women. In her grief and anger at being abandoned, she had an abortion. Ying-ying remarks ironically that Lena thinks she doesn’t know “what it means to not want a baby.”

Ying-ying was born in the year of the Tiger, and her tiger spirit helped her overcome adversity. The tiger’s colors symbolize its two sides: The gold side is powerful and active; the black side is shrewd and patient. She learned to be patient after her husband left her. Overcome by depression, she left her mother-in-law’s home and moved in with some cousins in the country outside Shanghai. She lived in crowded, dirty conditions for 10 years. Then she moved to the city and got a job selling women’s clothing.

Clifford St. Clair, an American clothing importer, introduced himself one day. Ying-ying found him unremarkable, but she also knew he was a sign that her life was about to change again.

Four years later a letter from her aunt told her that her husband was dead. Ying-ying “decided to let Saint marry [her].” She put aside her own spirit, her chi, because it had only brought her pain and describes herself as “a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.” She came to America with him and raised a daughter with whom she did not feel close. She didn’t care, because she had no spirit. She can’t say she didn’t love her husband, but she says “it was the love of a ghost.”

Ying-ying wants to give Lena her tiger spirit, because, to Ying-ying’s shame, Lena has no chi. She can hear Lena and Harold talking downstairs. She knows that once she knocks over the vase and table, Lena will come upstairs. She says, “Her eyes will see nothing in the darkness, where I am waiting between the trees.”

Analysis

The image that unites this story is that of the tiger. Ying-ying was born in 1914, a year of the Tiger. Her husband fills out her paperwork incorrectly when she enters the United States, we are told in “The Voice from the Wall,” but that does not change her from a Tiger to a Dragon.

According to the Chinese zodiac, which runs on a 12-year cycle, tigers have great courage. They are sensitive, emotional, kind to their friends, and capable of great love. They can also be mean and stubborn, and they do not trust easily. Many of these qualities describe Ying-ying.

As a child Ying-ying might be characterized as living in the golden, or yang, side of the tiger because she is very active. As a young woman she stubbornly believes she is too good for any one man. When she falls in love with her first husband, however, every action she takes is designed to please him.

When he abandons her for another, Ying-ying aborts his son. Here the reader learns the background for Ying-ying’s statement in “The Voice from the Wall” that the loss of her second son was her fault partly because “I had given no thought to killing my other son!” The years spent in the country may be seen as living in the black, yin, side of her tiger, passive and patient.

When the news of her first husband’s death comes 14 years later, she decides to marry Clifford St. Clair, whom she calls “Saint.” To do that, she says, “I willingly gave up my chi, the spirit that caused me so much pain.”

Chi describes not only force of personality, but also a sense of self-worth. When Ying-ying suppresses hers, Lena has no model to learn from. As a result both women are manipulated by their husbands without protest in “Rice Husband,” one linguistically and one financially. Ying-ying feels responsible that Lena will not speak up for herself. Before she dies, Ying-ying wants to pass on her chi, a final gift to Lena.

In the closing scene, she summons the pain she has avoided to fashion a metaphoric weapon. Lena, born in 1950 and also a Tiger, will resist her mother because she does not see what Ying-ying sees. The end of “Rice Husband” suggests that Lena is beginning to see that change is needed, however, so the reader is hopeful for both women’s sakes.

Double Face Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Lindo’s helper in Peking: never named, she gives Lindo advice about coming to America

Lindo’s helper in San Francisco: never named, she helps Lindo get an apartment and job

Summary

Lindo narrates this story, set in the present. Waverly has second thoughts about going to China on her honeymoon with Rich. Lindo assures her that everyone in China will know she is not Chinese by the look on her face.

Lindo wanted her children to have “the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character.” She did not realize that the two don’t mix. She was able to teach Waverly the American part about opportunity but not the Chinese part about personal integrity.

Lindo and Waverly are at Mr. Rory’s, having Lindo’s hair styled. When Mr. Rory mentions that Lindo and Waverly look alike, Lindo tells Waverly a person can see someone’s character and future in their facial features.

Lindo recalls coming to America. She had paid a woman to advise her on how to deal with American immigration officials and how to complete paperwork. The woman had also given her the address of someone in San Francisco’s Chinatown who would help her after she arrived. The woman in Chinatown charged Lindo $3.00 for a hastily jotted list of addresses. Lindo used the list to find an apartment and a job in a fortune cookie factory, where she made a friend, An-mei Hsu.

An-mei introduced Lindo to Tin Jong. At first Lindo objected to An-mei’s introducing her to someone from a different region of China, but An-mei pointed out that, in America, “everybody is now from the same village even if they come from different parts of China.” Because Lindo and Tin spoke different dialects of Chinese, they couldn’t really speak to each other. They attended English class together, and sometimes wrote in Chinese. Lindo was sure Tin really liked her, though, because he would act out what he was trying to say. Lindo used a carefully planted fortune cookie to let Tin know she wanted to marry him. Nine months after their marriage their first child, Winston, was born.

When Waverly was born, Lindo started thinking about things differently. She wanted everything to be better for her daughter. She named her after the street they lived on because she wanted Waverly to know she belonged somewhere. She also realized that one day her daughter would move away “and take a piece of me with [her].”

The story returns to the present, as Mr. Rory puts the finishing touches on Lindo’s hair. Lindo compares her reflection to her daughter’s and notices Waverly’s nose is crooked. Waverly says it has always been this way, just like Lindo’s; and she likes it. It makes them both look devious.

Lindo remembers that when she returned to China last year, everyone could tell she was a foreigner. She wonders what she has lost and gained, and decides she will ask Waverly’s opinion.

Analysis

The title “Double Face” returns the reader to the motif of yin and yang, which dominates the novel. In this story, however, more attention is placed on the search for balance between the two. The title works on several levels, suggesting the duality of Lindo and Waverly, of American circumstances and Chinese character, of Lindo’s “American face,” which hides her thoughts, and her “Chinese face,” which is sincere, and even the duality of a straight nose and a crooked one.

One of the important images in this story is the reflection in the hairdresser’s mirror. Waverly is a reflection of Lindo, and Lindo is proud of her. Lindo, on the other hand, will reflect on Waverly at the wedding; and Waverly is not proud of her. Lindo is disappointed. Reflection also serves as a metaphor as Lindo thinks about the events of her life before Waverly’s birth.

When Mr. Rory remarks on how much the two women look alike, Lindo is pleased, but Waverly is not. The reader will recall that young women often resist identifying with their mothers from the discussion in “Best Quality.” Waverly certainly fits that pattern. She refers to Lindo in the third person while she is present, for example, and asks her a question and then answers it herself. She does not treat her mother as she would treat anyone else she respects.

Lindo’s reflection on the day her mother told her fortune by reading her face points indirectly to Waverly, too, since the two women look so much alike. Her mother warns that a twisted nose leads to bad luck. A woman who has a crooked nose, she says, “is always following the wrong things, the wrong people, the worst luck.” Lindo’s nose is straight until the bus accident, but Waverly’s has always been crooked. She likes it, saying it makes both women look “devious,” which she defines as “looking one way, while following another….We mean what we say, but our intentions are different…we’re two-faced.” As long as she gets what she wants, Waverly is happy to be two-faced.

This is a very un-Chinese way of thinking. Lindo has to get used to it. She remembers that, on her recent trip to China, everyone knew just by looking at her face that she was a foreigner. Lindo wonders what she has lost and gained from her American circumstances. In a move that suggests that she has come to value Waverly’s opinion, she decides to ask her.

One of the strengths of this story is Lindo’s voice summarizing her life. The author grants the older generation a respect that her character Waverly does not. The daughter will have the last word only because her mother values her opinion. The stories of the mothers do not end just because the daughters are adults. Wisdom continues to develop. In this sense Tan is using a Chinese character trait, respect, to illustrate American circumstances.

                         

A Pair of Tickets Summary and Analysis

New Characters:

Aiyi: Jing-mei’s great-aunt

Lili: Aiyi’s great-granddaughter

Wang Chwun Yu and Wang Chwun Hwa: Suyuan’s twin daughters, Jing-mei’s half sisters. Their names mean “Spring Rain” and “Spring Flower”

Mei Ching and Mei Han: the couple who find and raise the twins

Suyuan’s schoolmate: never named. She recognizes the twins and contacts Suyuan with their address

Summary

Jing-mei narrates this story. She and her father are on a train from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, China. Her father has tears in his eyes as he looks out the train window at the countryside. Even Jing-mei is moved by the sight, “as if [she] had seen this a long, long time ago, and had almost forgotten.” After they visit Canning’s aunt in Guangzhou, they will go to Shanghai to meet Jing-mei’s twin half sisters, whom she has never seen before.

At Guangzhou Jing-mei and her father meet Aiyi, his aunt, and her family. The city seems very modern, and the taxi pulls up in front of an imposing hotel that doesn’t fit Jing-mei’s ideas of Communist China. The rooms are even stocked with Western snacks and drinks. The family decides just to stay at the hotel so they can visit.

At 1:00 a.m. Jing-mei wakes up, sitting on the floor in her hotel room. Everyone has gone to sleep except Aiyi and Canning, talking quietly about Suyuan’s daughters. Jing-mei asks why her mother abandoned the twins.

Canning narrates this flashback. Suyuan walked several days, unable to get a ride. Eventually she could not walk any farther. Convinced she was going to die, she put the babies on the side of the road and lay down next to them, begging passers-by to take them. No one would.

When no one was left on the road, Suyuan put jewelry under one girl’s shirt and money under the other’s. She wrote a message on the backs of photos of her family, asking whoever found the girls to take care of them and take them to their family in Shanghai for a reward. She touched the girls on the cheek and left without looking back. Her only hope was that they would be found by someone who would take good care of them. She did not allow herself to envision any other alternative.

She walked a while, then fainted. She awoke to find she had been rescued by American missionaries who brought her to Chungking, where she learned that her husband had died two weeks earlier. She met Canning in the hospital there.

Mei Ching and her husband, Mei Han, who lived in a hidden cave, found the twins and raised them, since they had no children of their own. They discovered the valuables and photographs Suyuan had left, but neither of them could read. By the time they found someone who could tell them what was written on the photographs, Mei Ching didn’t want to give them up.

When the girls were eight, Mei Han died. Mei Ching decided to take the girls back to their family, hoping she would be hired as their nanny. The address on the back of the pictures was now a factory, though, and no one knew anything about the family whose house had been at that site. Suyuan and Canning had returned to that address, too, seven years earlier, hoping to find her daughters and family.

When it was possible to send mail to China once again, Suyuan immediately began to write to her old friends, asking them to look for her daughters. Suyuan even contemplated going back to China, but Canning, not knowing her motives, told her they were too old for the trip. Canning wonders if perhaps Suyuan’s spirit guided the friend from Shanghai who found the twins walking down the stairs in a department store not long after Suyuan died.

Jing-mei narrates as she and Canning say good-bye to Aiyi and her family at the airport, knowing they’ll never meet again. Their plane lands in Shanghai. Someone shouts, “She’s arrived!” and Jing-mei thinks she sees her mother. Then she sees the other sister. Both are waving, and one is holding the picture of her she sent them earlier. Once Jing-mei gets past the gate, they all hug.

Her sisters look familiar to her. She realizes that she is Chinese because her family is Chinese. As Suyuan had predicted, it was in her blood, “waiting to be let go.”

Canning takes a Polaroid of the three women, and they stand together to watch it develop:

The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don’t speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.

Analysis

Jing-mei’s trip to China serves as a metaphor for a journey into her perceptions about herself. She considers how she has viewed her sisters, China itself, her mother, and herself as Chinese.

Tan incorporates a subtle motif about age that points out not only Jing-mei’s view of her sisters but also everyone else’s assumptions about her. At first Jing-mei thinks of her sisters only as babies. When she discovers that they are alive, she pictures them first as six-year-olds and later as ten or eleven. Not until she imagines herself bringing them the news of Suyuan’s death does she see them as adults. The motif resurfaces when Jing-mei meets Aiyi, her great-aunt. Aiyi’s first word to her is “Jandale,” “So big already.” Her sisters say something similar when she meets them at last: “Meimei jandale,” “Little sister has grown up.” Other changes in vision also take place.

For example, Jing-mei says, “This is Communist China?” as she gets used to the idea of modern cities and traffic, luxurious Western-style hotels, and Western food. She expected China to be like the shampoo in the hotel, somehow inferior. Being Chinese is not what she thought it would be, either. In China Jing-mei does not look different from anyone else. In America she is separated from many people by appearance. Here, she fits right in.

During the trip Jing-mei also learns the rest of her mother’s wartime story. She sees that her actions were justified. Suyuan’s quixotic and necessary efforts to find the girls again ennoble her. The Dickensian coincidence of the girls’ discovery becomes a forgivable device when matched with the tragedy of Suyuan’s early death. Jing-mei sees her mother in a different light. In “The Joy Luck Club,” she said she didn’t know anything about her mother. By the time she meets her sisters, she has much to tell them.

The new perception of her mother leads Jing-mei to a new understanding of herself. From the generation before her father to the generation after her, she sees friendly, hardworking people who seem very typical to her. Her family is Chinese, and she does not have to resist the designation any longer. “It is so obvious…After all these years, it can finally be let go.”

The meeting with her sisters, long anticipated in the novel, is anticlimactic. It serves more as a resolution to the conflicts Jing-mei and Suyuan experienced individually and together. As the women crowd around the Polaroid, a device Tan uses throughout the story, the reader sees Suyuan’s strength and influence as surely as the three women see her physical characteristics. Her hope has become their joy and luck.

Total Analysis

The Joy Luck Club

(LITERARY MASTERPIECES, VOLUME 34)

In a brief story that opens The Joy Luck Club, a woman leaves Shanghai for America, carrying with her a beautiful swan which she is determined to give one day to her yet unborn daughter, as a symbol of her high aspirations for her in the new land. At the immigrations office amid a confusion of forms and foreign sounds, the swan is confiscated, leaving the woman with only one loose feather and a now dazed conviction about why she had even wanted to come to America. Nevertheless, she saves the worthless-looking feather, still planning to hand it someday to her daughter, in hopes that it will carry some of the good intentions for her offspring that had originally launched her on her way. The Joy Luck Club is about those things handed down from Chinese-born mothers to their American-born daughters; like the swan’s feather, this legacy carries with it a mixture of both hope and disappointment, pain and love. More than only a record of the cultural transition from the old world to the new, The Joy Luck Club asks a universal and penetrating question: What exactly is it that daughters, in any culture, inherit from their mothers?

Eight women, each of four mother-daughter pairs, narrate the novel. Their common link is the Joy Luck Club, a weekly mah-jongg party, formed in San Francisco in the 1940’s by four Chinese emigrants as a way to erase the tragedies left behind in war-torn China and to foster new hopes for their futures. As the novel begins, in the 1980’s, one of the members of the club, Suyuan Woo, has just died; her Americanized daughter June is expected to take her mother’s place at the mah-jongg table. The rituals of the evening’s game are at once familiar and mystifying to June, calling into relief the powerful cultural dissonance between the two generations and reminding June of all those qualities in her mother which she had intimately known yet never fully understood. Toward the end of the evening the aunties spring a surprise on June: The two daughters her mother had borne from a previous marriage and that she tragically had to abandon have, after a years-long search by her mother, finally been located, sadly, within weeks of her mother’s death. The aunties have arranged for June to go to China and meet these women, so she can tell them all she can about the mother they never knew. “What will I say?” June wonders, “What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything.” Dismayed but not surprised at June’s response, the aunties see in her their own Americanized daughters,just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds “joy luck” is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.

Semi-autobiographical, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club becomes itself the means by which this connecting hope can be passed on to future generations. Tan, an American-born daughter of a Chinese-born mother, was moved to write the book after her mother’s heart attack. Even when Tan was a child her mother complained how little her daughter knew and understood of her. In the dedication Tan replies, “You asked me once what I would remember. This, and much more.”

In the novel, June resolves to go to China and tell her half-sisters all she knows of her mother; the aunties eye her warily. So the text begins, a shared text, with each mother and each daughter weaving her own interior meditation on this generational gulf and the struggle toward connection. The book is divided into four sections, comprising four chapters each. June is the only narrator appearing in all four sections; the mothers speak in the first and fourth sections, while the daughters narrate the second and third. The device of eight narrators works somewhat like a liquid house of mirrors, a series of reflecting pools simultaneously reflecting and not so much distorting as remaking images and events. What is seen through one pair of eyes is played back through another’s; each time more is learned. Sometimes it is the same incident that is seen from different sides, other times it is an oblique reverberation, as when June receives a jade pendant from Suyuan, echoing the gift of the feather described on the opening page.

The story of the swan’s feather sounds out the hopes and intentions of the giver of the gift, while the account of the necklace amplifies the bewilderment, even ingratitude, of its recipient. Says June,The pendant was not a piece of jewelry I would have chosen for myself. It was almost the size of my little finger, a mottled green and white color, intricately carved. To me, the whole effect looked wrong: too large, too green, too garishly ornate. I stuffed the necklace in my lacquer box and forgot about it.

The necklace is emblematic of the broken communication between mother and daughter—and the sharp pain that tears beneath the surface of this relationship. What one values, the other derides. The daughters sneer at their mothers’ stinginess, their haggling with shopkeepers, their foolish superstitions, their belief that danger lurks around every corner, their broken English, their garish clothes. The mothers sit in judgment on their daughters’ foolish choices, their wasted opportunities, their love affairs with useless modern objects, and their incomprehensible alliances with Caucasian men.

Though their cultural differences make this rift particularly acute, the gulf that Tan describes is fairly universal. It is not only among Chinese-American mothers and daughters that there is so much mutual disappointment, so many hidden resentments, as well as such a profound yearning for a greater love that can transcend the pain. June still feels the sharp pangs of her mother’s disappointment in her as a child, when she never quite materialized into the child prodigy that her mother hoped would bring June an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” as well as all the boasting rights Suyuan could have then enjoyed among her friends. Yet a few months before her death, after a dinner party where June is sorely one-upped by her rival Waverly, Suyuan takes June aside and bestows the gift of the jade pendant, calling it her “life’s importance.” June accepts this as a deep expression of her mother’s love, despite the fact the intricate carvings are opaque to her, carrying secrets she supposes she will never understand. After her mother’s death she wears the necklace all the time, in hopes that she might absorb her mother’s meaning through her skin.

The mothers’ hope is that their daughters will grow to combine all the best of Chinese character with all the best of American circumstances and opportunities. Their pain is that much of the Chinese character seems to have gotten lost in the translation. It is a Chinese custom for daughters to honor and listen obediently to their mothers, but American freedom infiltrates and distorts this tradition. As a child, Waverly Jong exhibits a remarkable skill at chess. Disturbed at the way her mother swells up with pride and takes credit for her own tournament victories, Waverly publicly humiliates her. Years later, Lindo Jong still burns under her daughter’s disregard when at the hairdresser’s, Waverly discusses Lindo with the stylist as though she were not even there. Nevertheless, Waverly’s narrative reveals how much power her mother still holds over her. For weeks she tries to confide in her mother that the man she is currently seeing will soon become her husband; she lives in terror of her mother’s response. Inside she acknowledges that Lindo has the power to ruin completely her love affair, by pointing out some flaw in her fiancé that, once seen, will make him seem irretrievably small in her eyes. The American-born daughters may seem to speak a new language of disrespect, but the psychic hold their Chinese mothers wield is unquestionably strong.

To the degree that the daughters fear their mothers’ disapproval, the mothers fear they will slip from their daughters’ lives unseen, unremembered, the precious thread of connection severed by their sour-faced daughters’ cool American disregard. It is difficult, however, to hold the daughters accountable for those secrets which their mothers have never shared. In the narratives of An-mei, Lindo, and Ying-ying lie the keys which would unlock the grim-faced behaviors that have hurt and mystified their daughters Rose, Waverly, and Lena. The mothers’ narratives reveal a legacy of pain, abandonment, humiliation, and loss that somehow clarifies those tendencies which their daughters have grown to hate and fear. It also becomes clear that each mother in her own way has had a troubled relationship with her mother, dating the legacy of hurt and misunderstanding farther back than this one generation. What emerges from the mothers’ narratives is a portrait of remarkable survivors; their daughters do not fully understand, but for that they can hardly be blamed.

Given that so much has gone unexpressed, what then does get passed on from mother to daughter? “You can see your character in your face,” Lindo tells her daughter. In the hairdresser’s mirror Waverly studies her cheeks, her nose; they are the same as her mother’s, and, Lindo notes, they are the same as her own mother’s before her. The flesh carries the memory, and if the nose gets passed on, something of the spirit does too. What clearly emerges from the narratives are the intangible, unspoken legacies each girl has received. Waverly has Lindo’s cunning, her gift of strategy, her competitiveness, and her sharp tongue. Rose, like An-mei, has “too little wood”; each bends too easily to others’ opinions and must learn to speak her own mind. Lena, like Ying-ying, must find her tiger spirit and fight her tendency to slip invisibly into the background. June finds herself growing territorial, hissing at the neighbors’ cat just as her mother had done. The similarities between mother and daughter gradually take shape, much like the slowly developing Polaroid photo of June and her two half-sisters taken at the Shanghai airport. They watch as their images become clear; not one of them is exactly like their mother, but taken together their likenesses conjure up Suyuan’s as well. As An-mei tells June, “Your mother is in your bones.”

The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan’s first novel. Though it is common for first novels to exhibit some unevenness, particularly in characterization, Tan’s characters are fully and beautifully drawn. Her language is graceful, her eye for detail is strong. If there is a flaw in the novel, it is that the eight different narrators and their filial connections are sometimes difficult to keep straight, but the richness of the book makes it well worth the effort to do so.

Form and Content

(SURVEY OF YOUNG ADULT FICTION)

The Joy Luck Club is a story cycle told by seven voices. It consists of four sections, each divided into four separate stories. The first and last sections present four mothers’ stories, and the middle sections are devoted to the stories of their daughters. In each section, however, one story is narrated by June Woo, who, now that her mother is dead, must sit at her mother’s place at the mah-jongg table—“on the East, where things begin”—and relate not only her own stories but also those of her mother.

Suyuan Woo, June’s mother, started the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club, a regular social affair organized around a game of chance, in 1949, after she and the other Chinese “aunties”—the mothers of the book—had immigrated to the United States. The club originated, as they did, in China, as a means of raising the spirits of four women (Suyuan and three other nonrecurring characters) during the Japanese assault on Kweilin. Decades later and in another country, the aunties continue their social gatherings as a means of hanging onto their identities under the assault of yet another foreign culture.

It is through their American-born daughters that these women most experience this sense of loss—either because the daughters are too much like them, too “Chinese,” or because the daughters have become so assimilated as to forget their origins. For all the young women but June, who remains single, the primary source of conflict with their mothers seems to arise from their marriages. Waverly Jong, whose first marriage to her childhood sweetheart was ruined in part by her mother’s criticisms of her Chinese American husband, is fearful now of what Lindo will say about her daughter’s engagement to the all-American Rich Shields. Lena St. Clair finds herself at odds with her mother because of the alienation wrought by her marriage, now breaking apart, to a selfish American. When Rose Hsu Jordan informs her mother that her marriage to yet another selfish American man has already broken down, An-Mei muses:. . . I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I thought my daughter the opposite, still she come out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

The Joy Luck Club, continuity between generations is at once a blessing and a burden.

Places Discussed

(CRITICAL GUIDE TO SETTINGS AND PLACES IN LITERATURE)

San Francisco

San Francisco. Northern California city that is home to most of the novel’s characters. Three of the four families of the Joy Luck Club settled in Chinatown on their arrival in America, seeking the comforts of a place with an established Chinese community, one filled with the fragrances of familiar foods, such as fried sesame balls; familiar landmarks, such as herb shops and fish markets; and people like them. Indicative of their mothers’ drive to assimilate, Waverly Jong is even named after her parents’ home on Waverly Place.

As these immigrant families became successful, they moved into upper-middle-class neighborhoods, such as Ashbury Heights. However, for Ying-Ying St. Clair, the move from Oakland, across the Bay, to San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood remains unsettling. Her attempt to use feng shui to create a harmonious spiritual balance fails when the child she conceives in the new home miscarries.

San Francisco mirrors the emotional conflicts of the characters. It is a place where a Bank of America building and a McDonald’s restaurant rise up next to the shops and apartment buildings of Chinatown, threatening to tower over them, just as the mothers worry about the impact of American culture on their daughters’ Chinese heritage.

Kweilin

Kweilin (KWAY-lin; Guilin in Pinyin). City in China to which Suyuan Woo was evacuated after the Japanese invasion in 1937. She had no eyes for the beauty of the city; to her its fabled mountains merely looked like fish heads, behind which lurked an advancing enemy. Its caves provided shelter from air raids pounding the beleaguered town. The city teemed with refugees from all corners of China, and misery abounded. To preserve hope, Suyuan formed her first Joy Luck Club there.

Kweilin-Chungking road

Kweilin-Chungking road. While fleeing Kweilin for Chungking as the Japanese were invading, Suyuan had to abandon her twin baby daughters along the road, which was choked with refugees. The despair of the refugees was echoed by the overcrowded road, the sides of which were littered with discarded possessions. Most refugees trekked through this bleak apocalyptic landscape on foot, while a fortunate few escaped in trucks.

The road holds the mystery of Suyuan’s babies, which is the novel’s framing device. When her American-born daughter, Jing-mei, first learns what her mother had done, she seems callous to her. However, after Jing-mei reaches China and learns the full story of her half-sisters’ abandonment, she can forgive her mother.

Wushi

Wushi (wew-shee; Wuxi). Chinese city one hundred miles northeast of Shanghai at the shores of large and beautiful Tai Lake that was the site of Ying-Ying St. Clair’s privileged youth. While living in San Francisco, she nostalgically remembers the splendor of the Moon Festival on the lake. Yet the lake also represents danger, for she nearly drowned there. Later, she fell in love with her husband on the lake.

Shanghai

Shanghai. Great Chinese port city to which Ying-Ying went after learning of her husband’s infidelity in Wushi. Taking advantage of the city’s opportunities, Ying-Ying worked in a clothing store, where she met and married Clifford St. Clair. Like the friends she later finds in San Francisco, she leaves behind a China that holds bitter memories.

Tientsin

Tientsin (TEEN-tseen; Tianjin). Bustling Chinese port city south of Beijing. One of China’s “treaty ports,” where foreigners had their own enclaves exempt from Chinese law. An-mei Hsu was amazed by the city’s colorful life when she arrived there with her mother from their hometown of Ningpo, near Shanghai. Yet the city’s sparkle and the splendors of their palatial, Western-style home quickly wore off when An-mei learned that her mother was forced to be a concubine.

Taiyuan

Taiyuan (TAY-ywan). Capital of China’s Shanxi province that contains major parts of the Great Wall. Surrounded by rough mountains, the Fen River runs through it. Lindo Jong grew up there in a low-lying peasant house, which was inundated by a flood, while the house of her future husband was built on richer, higher ground and remained intact. After getting out of her arranged marriage, Lindo left Taiyuan for Beijing and later America.

Jordan house

Jordan house. San Francisco home of Rose Hsu and her husband, Ted Jordan. After her husband announces that he wants a divorce, Rose refuses to let him have the house; her refusal signifies her newly discovered sense of self-worth.

Form and Content

(MASTERPIECES OF WOMEN'S LITERATURE)

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a narrative mosaic made up of the lives of four Chinese women and their Chinese American daughters. Because of its structure, the book can only loosely be called a novel. It is composed of sixteen stories and four vignettes, but like many novels, it has central characters who develop through the course of the plot. The daughters struggle with the complexities of modern life, including identity crises and troubled relationships, while the mothers reflect on past actions that were dictated by culture and circumstance. The lives of the older women are bound together through their similar situations as immigrants and their monthly mah-jongg games at Joy Luck Club meetings.

Each of the stories is a first-person narration by one of the Joy Luck Club’s three mothers or four daughters. Each narrator tells two stories about her own life, except for Jing-mei (June) Woo, who stands in for her deceased mother, telling a total of four stories. The tales are arranged in four groups, with a vignette preceding each group. The first group is told by mothers (plus June), the second and third groups by daughters, and the fourth by mothers. Jing-mei’s final story, in which she learns her mother’s history, concludes the book.

Since The Joy Luck Club is concerned with the relation of the present to the past, many stories take place in more than one time period. For example, in the last group of stories, the mothers begin their narration in the present time of the 1980’s but then recall incidents that occurred when they were girls or young women: An-mei’s mother’s death, Ying-ying’s first marriage, and Lindo’s immigration to the United States. The narratives of the daughters are set in the 1960’s, the time of their youth, or in the 1980’s, with flashbacks to various earlier times. The first group of daughters’ stories focuses on significant childhood experiences, while their second stories explore issues that they are experiencing as adults.

The daughters’ tales are all set in the San Francisco Bay area, whereas the mothers’ stories span two countries, China and the United States. Both rural and urban scenes in prewar China are depicted, and details related to festivals, customs, dress, housing, and food provide a rich backdrop to the central events in the narratives. June’s final story, “A Pair of Tickets,” takes her to a more modern China, where she finds Western capitalistic influences making inroads after nearly forty years of Communist Party rule.

The book examines a number of sociological issues from a woman’s perspective: the death of parents, husbands, and children; marriage, adultery, and divorce; childbirth and abortion; and aging. The exploration, however, is often indirect. Situations are presented and later their consequences are shown. For example, Ying-ying’s guilt over aborting her first child haunts a later pregnancy, and her daughter Lena’s bulimic episode as an adolescent affects her eating habits as an adult. Exotic touches are added to the book’s realistic rendering of emotions and incidents by means of references to Chinese folklore and superstition. Tan balances Eastern and Western points of view in her portrayal of the significant events of life.

Context

(MASTERPIECES OF WOMEN'S LITERATURE)

The Joy Luck Club highlights the influence of culture on gender roles. The Chinese mothers in the book, all born in the 1910’s, grew up in a hierarchical society in which a woman’s worth was measured by her husband’s status and his family’s wealth. When they were young, the women were taught to repress their own desires so that they would learn to preserve the family honor and obey their husbands. The difficulties in marriage encountered by Lindo and Ying-ying as well as by An-mei’s mother emphasize how few options were open to women in a tightly structured society in which their economic security and social standing were completely dependent on men.

Consequently, when the mothers immigrate to the United States, they want their daughters to retain their Chinese character but take advantage of the more flexible roles offered to women by American culture. The postwar baby-boomer daughters, however, are overwhelmed by having too many choices available. They struggle to balance multiple roles as career women, wives or girlfriends, and daughters. The materialistic focus of American culture makes it difficult for the daughters to internalize their mothers’ values, particularly the self-sacrifice, determination, and family integrity that traditional Chinese culture stresses.

In addition to gender roles, mother-daughter relationships are an important focus of the book. Mothers are shown to have profound influence over their daughters’ development, yet their influence is constrained by the surrounding culture. As girls, the Chinese women wanted to be like their mothers, whereas the American-born daughters are estranged from their mothers. This contrast is consistent with a difference between cultures: Americans expect their children to rebel against parental authority, while the Chinese promote obedience and conformity. The daughters in The Joy Luck Club think that their mothers are odd because they speak broken English and miss the subtleties of American culture pertaining to dress and social behavior. They also tend to see their mothers as pushy. Waverly and June rebel against their mothers’ expectations without understanding that Lindo and Suyuan are trying to give their daughters the opportunities that they never had themselves. As adults, Waverly and June struggle with the conflicting desires of pleasing their mothers and developing their own individuality. Because they perceive their mothers’ guidance as criticism, they are slow to understand the depth of their mothers’ love and sacrifice for them.

Despite such generational and cultural gaps, the author suggests that daughters resemble their mothers in character as well as in appearance. Waverly possesses Lindo’s shrewdness, and Rose shares An-mei’s passivity in the face of suffering. By developing four central mother-daughter relationships rather than only one, Tan reveals that the factors which shape family resemblance, both negative and positive, are varied and complex.

Historical Context

(NOVELS FOR STUDENTS)

Historical China

While The Joy Luck Club was published in 1989, it is set in pre-World War II China and contemporary San Francisco. The two settings strengthen the contrast between the cultures that Tan depicts through her characters and their relationships. Pre-World War II China was a country heavily embroiled in conflict. San Francisco, however, offered freedom and peace. In writing the novel, Tan wanted to portray not only the importance of mother/daughter relationships but also the dignity of the Chinese people.

China's history covers years of tradition, yet also decades of change. While the Chinese people consistently honor the personal qualities of dignity, respect, self-control, and obedience, they have not so continually pledged allegiance to their leaders. The first documented Chinese civilization was the Shang dynasty (c. 1523-c. 1027 BC). Various dynasties ruled over the years, ending with the Manchu dynasty in 1912. The dynasties saw peace, expansion, and technological and artistic achievement as well as warfare and chaos. Foreign intervention, particularly by Japan, created instability in the country, and internal struggles often prevented the Chinese from uniting. The area of Manchuria in northeast China, while legally belonging to China, had many Japanese investments, such as railways, and as such was under the control of the Japanese. This led to anti-Manchu sentiment and an eventual revolution. After civil war and additional strife, the Nationalists and Communists fought the Japanese in the second Sino-Japanese War and won when Japan was defeated by the Allies of World War II in 1945.

It is just before this victory that the mothers' stories start. Japanese aggression led to a foreign military presence on Chinese soil, and Suyuan's story in particular details the flight from the invading Japanese that was made by many Chinese. After World War II, with Japan preoccupied in recovering from their defeat, China once again became embroiled in a civil war between the Nationalists, who had been in power for several years, and the Communists, who wished to establish a new form of government. The civil war ended in 1949 with the formation of the People's Republic of China, and the Communists have held power in China since then.

Chinese Immigration to America

After the United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, freeing many of the African Americans who had worked in fields and farms, there arose a great need for manual laborers. Migrants from China filled a large part of this need, especially in the West, where rapid expansion required people to build railroads and towns. Although greatly outnumbered by white immigrants from European nations, the number of Chinese arriving in America alarmed white settlers in the West. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States. Although there were less than 300,000 total Asian immigrants to the U S. in the years between 1880 and 1909, immigration restrictions on Chinese and other Asians were tightened in 1902 and again in 1917. These laws were repealed in 1943, and in 1965 Congress passed a law which abolished immigration quotas based on national origin. In the 1980s and 1990s, China has placed in the top ten countries sending legal immigrants to the U.S. (illegal immigration is a growing problem), with almost 39,000 immigrants admitted in 1992.

Chinese immigrants often faced considerable prejudice in their new country. In the early part of the century, Chinese immigrant children attended segregated schools in the "Chinatowns" where they lived. During World War II, when Japanese Americans faced hostility and internment because of Japan's involvement in the war, Chinese Americans also encountered prejudice from people who mistook them for Japanese, although they were not deprived of property by the government. This struggle for acceptance is reflected in the novel as both mothers and daughters wish to excel in "American" society. Just as the United States has learned to value contributions of Americans of various backgrounds, the daughters in The Joy Luck Club learn to value their own Chinese heritage.

Literary Techniques

(BEACHAM'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR FICTION)

Like the four sides of the mah-jong table, the book is structured with an almost classical balance: four mothers' stories, four daughters' stories; then four more daughters' stories, four more mothers' stories, climaxing with a visit to China and the discovery of things long lost.

Tan speaks with authentic voices, both the American voices as heard in the next apartment ("You break your legs sliding down that bannister, I'm gonna break your neck"), and voices of Chinese mothers, such as comments about a handmade table: "What use for? You put something else on top, everything fall down. Chumvana chihan."

Social Concerns

(BEACHAM'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR FICTION)

The Joy Luck Club achieves much of its power by tapping into aspects of myth. It deals with things lost and things found, with masks and unmasking, with reuniting, climbing, deceit, and discovery. It does this, not by retelling ancient myths, but by gradually revealing the real life stories of Chinese women and their Chinese-American daughters. The book is structured around the meetings of a longstanding mah-jong club in San Francisco. Jing-Mei Woo has been invited to replace her mother, Suyuan Woo, who died two months earlier. The club is the American version of a similar club, also named The Joy Luck Club, formed by Suyuan Woo in Kweilin, China, during the difficult time shortly before that city's fall to the Japanese.

Each of the sixteen chapters is a story told by one of the eight main characters: four mothers, four daughters; two stories each. The mother-daughter relationships, complicated by the great differences in the worlds in which the mothers and daughters grew up, create the dynamic tension. Which tensions are based upon these differences, which grow out of universal mother-daughter conflicts, neither the reader nor the characters involved can determine. But as these women tell their stories, a gradual awareness develops of how much of the past cannot be retrieved, and yet how pervasive it is in the present, and how it gives emotional shape and color to the present. That which is inherited from the past is shown in these stories to be the key to the survival, meaning, and value of these lives.

The mothers' values are a part of this past. As the daughters attempt to separate themselves, and search for their own way, they find in their identity with their mothers' pasts much to hold onto. For their own part, the mothers worry about not being able to communicate the past to their daughters, which may result in losing contact with them. Even language, which is very much a concern of this book, proves to be a barrier between mothers and daughters. One mother says, "And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me." Another, says the epigraph, waited in vain, "year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect English."

Compare and Contrast

(NOVELS FOR STUDENTS)

1930s and 1940s: The Japanese occupied China. Full war erupted in 1945 in Beijing between the Chinese and Japanese. After the war, civil war breaks out and Communists take over the government in 1949, led by Mao Zedong.

Today: In 1989, a pro-democracy demonstration by Chinese university students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square is put down by the Communist government. While a 1993 constitutional revision does not reform the political system, it does call for the development of a socialist market economy.

1930s and 1940s: Various religions thrived in China, particularly Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Today: Once discouraged by Mao Zedong, religious practice has been revived to some degree. In addition to the traditional religions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism—there are also smaller groups of Muslims, Catholics, and Protestants.

1930s and 1940s: After a period from 1882 to 1943 that restricted Chinese immigration to the U.S., a new 1943 law extends citizenship rights and permits an annual immigration of 105 Chinese. Many refugees from the Sino-Japanese war flee to the United States.

Today: National origin quotas were abolished in 1965, and the 1990 Immigration Act raised the immigrant quota and reorganized the preference system for entrance. Nearly 39,000 Chinese immigrants enter the U S. in 1992, while almost 30,000 obtain visas to study at American universities.

Literary Precedents

(BEACHAM'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR FICTION)

Tan credits Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1984), a set of interwoven tales about Indian life, as a formative influence on her writing. The Joy Luck Club also is inevitably and frequently compared with its predecessors, Maxine Hong Kingston's three varied books: The Woman Warrior (1976), China Men (1980), and Tripmaster Monkey (1989). Tan's book is less determinedly historical than China Men, less political than Tripmaster Monkey; it can be most productively compared with The Woman Warrior in its transformed amalgam of family history and myth, and it holds its own well in such a comparison.

Tan also credits a literary heritage of sermons by her Baptist minister father, family stories, Chinese fairy tales, and parables for influence on her work.

Related Titles

(BEACHAM'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR FICTION)

The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) relates the story of Jiang Weili from the time she was six years old in the China of 1925 through the present, in which she is Winnie Louie, the widowed matriarch of an extended Chinese family living in San Francisco. Much like The Joy Luck Club, this novel feels as if Tan's ancestors are speaking through her as she transcends herself to triumph over ancestral ghosts. The theme of forgiveness, and the importance of understanding the miseries of others, continue here in Tan's second novel.

The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) is about a Chinese-American woman, Olivia, and her Chinese half-sister, Kwan, alternating between Kwan's stories of the past and Olivia's more modern story of a troubled marriage in which Olivia's husband is still attached to his first wife who was killed seventeen years earlier. Kwan believes she can communicate with ghosts, and in reincarnation. The two women return to China together, raise the specters of their respective pasts, and make their peace with their pasts.

Adaptations

(BEACHAM'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR FICTION)

Tan reads from The Joy Luck Club on audio tape by Dove.

In 1993, the motion picture version of The Joy Luck Club was released. It was directed by Wayne Wang, who has built a good reputation with motion pictures about Chinese-American life. Tan cowrote the screenplay with Ronald Bass. The female leads — Kieu Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen, and Lisa Lu — turn in good performances. Although it did well at the box office, critics found it confusing, especially when it flashed back to China. Even so, those who enjoy the novel are likely to enjoy the motion picture.

Bibliography and Further Reading

(NOVELS FOR STUDENTS)

Sources

Michael Dorns, "'Joy Luck Club' Hits the Literary Jackpot," in the Detroit News, March 26, 1989, p. 2D.

Current Biography Yearbook, Judith Graham, ed. New York: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1992. 559-63.

Marina Heung, “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club.” Feminist Studies. Fall 1993. 597-615.

Valerie Miner, “The Daughters’ Journeys.” The Nation. April 24, 1989. 566-67.

“Mother with a Past.” Maclean’s. July 15, 1991:47

Tracy Robinson, "The Intersections of Gender, Class, Race, and Culture On Seeing Clients Whole," in Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, Vol. 21, No. 1, January, 1993, pp. 50-8.

Walter Shear, “Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club.” Critique. Spring, 1993. 193-99.

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club. New York: Ivy Books, 1989.

For Further Study

Victoria Chen, "Chinese American Women, Language, and Moving Subjectivity," in Women and Language, Vol 18, no. 1, 1995, pp 3-7.

Chen argues that Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston use language differences between Chinese immigrants and their daughters to suggest "multiplicity and instability of cultural identity for Chinese American women."

Manna Heung, "DaughterText/MotherTexf Matnlineage in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club," in Feminist Studies, Vol 19, no. 3, 1993, pp 597-616.

Manna Heung argues that Tan's mother-daughter text is unique in its foregrounding of the mothers' voices.

A review of The Hundred Secret Senses in Kirkus Reviews, Volume 63, September 1, 1995, p. 1217.

The author again relies on female relationships in this story of a Chinese-Amencan, her Chinese half-sister, and the girls' belief in ghosts and communication with the dead. The reviewer feels that Tan spends too much time telling the story of Miss Banner but has positive words for the depiction of the Chinese sister's eccentncities and the bond between the two girls.

Glona Shen, "Born of a Stranger Mother-Daughter Relationships and Storytelling in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club," in International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identity, edited by Anne E. Brown and Marjanne B. Gooze, Greenwood, 1995, pp 233-44.

Glona Shen explores "the narrative strategy employed in The Joy Luck Club and the relationships between the Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters."

Amy Tan, "The Language of Discretion," in The State of the Language, edited by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels, University of California Press, 1990, pp. 25-32

Amy Tan argues that the Chinese are not as "discreet and modest" as most people believe and that the Chinese use their language emphatically and assertively.

Sao-Ling Cynthia Wong, "'Sugar Sisterhood': Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon," in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, edited by David Liu Palumbo, University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp. 174-210.

Sao-Ling Cynthia Wong puts The Joy Luck Club in its "socio-historical" context to explain the novel's success in the book market.

Bibliography

(MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE)

Chan, Jeffery Paul, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn H. Wong. “An Introduction to Chinese-American and Japanese-American Literatures.” In Three American Literatures, edited by Houston A. Baker, Jr. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1982. Arguing from the viewpoint that white supremacist thinking controls American culture, the authors detail the origins of a distinctly Asian American literature, a category not readily recognized by critics. The stereotype of the Asian American “dual personality” is rejected.

Chin, Frank. “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake.” In The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, edited by Jeffery Paul Chan et al. New York: Meridian, 1991. The article discusses Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and David Henry Hwang’s use of ancient Chinese myths and legends in their works.

Fong, S. L. M. “Assimilation and Changing Social Roles of Chinese Americans.” Journal of Social Issues 29, no. 2 (1973): 115-127. Examines the influence of acculturation and assimilation on traditional Chinese family structure and Chinese social hierarchy. Conflicts over parental authority and changes in sex roles and attitudes toward dating are discussed.

Kim, Elaine H. “Asian American Writers: A Bibliographical Review.” American Studies International 22, no. 2 (1984): 41-78. Provides a useful overview of various types of Asian American writing and its special concerns, such as the Vietnam War and gender issues, and discusses problems in the criticism of Asian American literature. A bibliography of primary works is included.

Kim, Elaine H. “ ‘Such Opposite Creatures’: Men and Women in Asian-American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 29, no. 1 (Winter, 1990): 68-93. The author briefly discusses mother-daughter relations in The Joy Luck Club in her examination of the different ways in which Asian American men and women portray gender and ethnicity in their writing.

Kim, Elaine H. With Silk Wings. San Francisco: Asian Women United of California, 1983. Following twelve profiles and forty short autobiographical sketches of Asian American women, this well-illustrated book provides the social and historical background of various groups of Asian women immigrants to the United States.

Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990. The book takes a feminist look at Asian American women writers’ contribution to the development of Asian American literature. Includes a section on The Joy Luck Club.

Souris, Stephen. “ ‘Only Two Kinds of Daughters’: Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in The Joy Luck Club.” Melus 19, no. 2 (1994): 99-123. Souris uses Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory in discussing how the novel requires the reader’s active involvement to create the meaning.

Tan, Amy. Interview by Angels Carabi. Belles Lettres (Summer, 1991): 16-19. Tan discusses her thoughts on being a creative writer and the popular success she achieved with The Joy Luck Club.

Tan, Amy. Interview by Barbara Somogyi and David Stanton. Poets & Writers 19, no. 5 (September 1, 1991): 24-32. In an informative interview, Tan talks about the origins of The Joy Luck Club, its autobiographical elements, and its portrayal of mother-daughter issues.

Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. The book takes a thematic approach to the study of contemporary Asian American literature. There are several places where the writer discusses Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club’s significance in the history of Asian American literature.

Media Adaptations

(NOVELS FOR STUDENTS)

An abridged sound recording of The Joy Luck Club is three hours long, available on 2 cassette tapes. Published in 1989 by Dove Audio, the book is read by its author, Amy Tan.

The movie version of The Joy Luck Club was released by Hollywood Pictures in 1993. While it does not include all the novel's stories, the film does a good job of presenting the most important scenes. The adaptation was written by Amy Tan and Ronald Bass and directed by Wayne Wang. Produced by noted filmmaker Oliver Stone, the film starred such actresses as Frances Nuyen, Rosalind Chao, MingNa Wen, and Lauren Tom. It is rated R, available from Buena Vista Home Video.

Themes

(NOVELS FOR STUDENTS)

Choices and Consequences

The Joy Luck Club presents the stories of four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters. All of their lives, the Chinese mothers in The Joy Luck Club have struggled to make their own decisions and establish their own identities in a culture where obedience and conformity are expected. For example, when Suyuan Woo is a refugee during the Japanese invasion, she decides that she will not be a passive victim and will choose her own happiness. She forms the Joy Luck Club to provide a distraction for herself and her friends. Thus, in a situation where there appears to be no room for disobedience, Suyuan creates an identity that she and her friends assume in order to survive. The continuation of the club in the United States helps Suyuan and her friends redefine themselves in a new culture.

The mothers want their daughters to take charge of their own lives, too. Yet the mothers find it difficult to voice their concerns and be open enough about their personal experiences to make their advice valid with their daughters. Ying-Ying St. Clair, however, sees her daughter Lena's unhappiness in her marriage and courageously faces her own bad memories to help Lena make the decisions she needs to make to be free.

Identity

The American-born daughters have their own choices to make and their own identities to establish. While their mothers want Chinese obedience from their daughters, they do not want their daughters to be too passive. The Chinese mothers want their daughters to have American-like strength. The daughters work to find compromises their mothers can accept. Rose Hsu Jordan, for example, overcomes her passivity with the help of her grandmother's story and stands up to a husband who is trying to take everything from her.

Throughout the stories presented in The Joy Luck Club runs the common thread of mother-daughter connectedness and its influence on a daughter's identity formation. Tan's portrayal of the intense relationships between and among her characters shows the strength of the ties that bind culture and generation. These firmly undergird the choices the characters make and the identities they shape as a result of their decisions.

Culture Clash

The American-born daughters are ambivalent about their Chinese background. While they eat Chinese foods and celebrate Chinese traditions, they want their Chinese heritage to remain at home. They make American choices when they are in public and cringe in embarrassment when their mothers speak in their broken English. Worst of all, the American daughters do not see the importance of "joy luck"; to them, it is not even a word. They regard the Joy Luck Club as a "shameful Chinese custom."

The Chinese mothers fear the end of Chinese tradition in their families. Their American-born daughters hide their Chinese heritage and think like Americans. While the Chinese mothers want their daughters to enjoy the benefits of being Americans, they do not want them to forget their roots. They hope that their daughters will develop strong American characters, yet keep positive Chinese beliefs alive. The mothers need the daughters to understand the significance of the Joy Luck Club and all that it represents.

The clash of adolescence with the Amencan and Chinese cultures leaves the Chinese mothers without hope for their daughters' Chinese futures. Yet, time works its magic; the daughters grow up, and the mothers' dreams prevail. The Joy Luck Club survives with a daughter, Jing-Mei, continuing the tradition in place of her deceased mother, Suyuan Woo. Broken ties mend, and hope for happiness despite misfortune (what the Chinese call "joy luck") lives.

Structure

In presenting the stories of four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters in The Joy Luck Club, Tan uses "cradling," a formal literary device that can be thought of as telling a story within a story, or nesting. In other words, Tan embeds the daughters' stories within the mothers' narratives. The Joy Luck Club is divided into four main segments that contain sixteen stories. The first and last sections tell eight stories—two for each mother—while the middle two sections each tell a story for each of the four daughters. The entire novel revolves primarily around the stories of Suyuan Woo and her daughter, Jing-Mei ("June"). Jing-Mei takes her mother's place in the Joy Luck Club, a club her mother created when she was in China and that she continued for her Chinese friends in America. Jing-Mei learns from her "aunties," the women who are members of the club, that they will fund her trip to China to meet with her "lost" sisters.

Setting

The Joy Luck Club is set in two places. The mothers' stories take place mostly in pre-World War II China, just before and during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). The daughters' stories occur primarily in contemporary San Francisco, although June does visit contemporary China in the final section. These differing settings help emphasize the culture clash experienced by many of the novel's characters.

Point of View and Narration

Tan uses several first-person narrators in the novel, narrators who directly speak to the reader by using "I said", "I did" to express events. Because three of the mothers and all of the daughters tell their own stories, the narrative shifts from a mother's point of view to a daughter's point of view. Except for Suyuan Woo, each mother speaks for herself in the first and final sections of the book; the daughters each speak for themselves in the second and third sections of the book. Since Suyuan has already died when the story opens, Jing-Mei speaks for her.

Conflict

Conflicts arise between each mother and her daughter as the result of generational and cultural differences. The mothers and daughters experience the typical difficulties in understanding each others' viewpoints. Daughters try to establish their personal identities by being like their mothers, yet different in response to contemporary pressures. These generational differences are compounded by the mothers' culture-driven views of tradition. The mothers want their daughters to be Americanized, yet they also want their daughters to honor the Chinese way of life. In Asian culture, women's identities are more often defined by their relationships to others than by their occupational success, as scholar Tracy Robinson has observed. For example, while Waverly Jong is different enough from her mother to have established herself as a successful tax attorney, she is enough like her mother that she worries that her mother will not accept her Caucasian fiance. The mothers' basic concern is that their daughters will turn their backs on their culture and their Chinese heritage will be forgotten

Symbols

Suyuan Woo's stories tell about a woman whose allegiances were divided between her American daughter and the Chinese daughters she had lost. Suyuan's Chinese and American souls are resurrected and reunited when the daughters meet at the end of the novel. The daughters' names symbolize this rebirth and reunion. Chwun Yu (Spring Rain), Chwun Hwa (Spring Rower), and Jing-Mei (June) represent the renewing force that is connected to the seasons of spring and summer. Even Suyuan's name, meaning Long-Cherished Wish, alludes to the resolution of the conflicts she and Jing-Mei shared. Finally, the Chinese interpretation of Jing-Mei's name, "pure essence and best quality," represents Jing-Mei's learning to appreciate and coming to terms with her Chinese heritage.

Characters Discussed

(GREAT CHARACTERS IN LITERATURE)

Suyuan Woo

Suyuan Woo, the founder of the Joy Luck Club, which meets monthly to play mah-jongg. In fleeing from a Japanese attack in 1944, she was forced to abandon her twin infant daughters on a road outside Kweilin. She searched for them until 1949, when she immigrated to San Francisco with her second husband. Her daughter Jing-mei was born in 1951. Suyuan secretly continued looking for her other daughters until her death at the age of seventy-two, two months before the book opens.

Jing-mei (June) Woo

Jing-mei (June) Woo, a thirty-six-year-old college dropout who writes advertising copy for a small ad agency in San Francisco. After her mother’s death, she learns that she has two half sisters still alive in China. By setting out to meet them, she begins coming to terms with her own Chinese heritage.

Lindo Jong

Lindo Jong, Suyuan’s competitive and critical best friend, who was born in 1918 in a village near Taiyuan. A marriage was arranged for her when she was two, and she joined her husband’s family when she was twelve. Eventually, she tricked her mother-in-law into dissolving the marriage. After immigrating to San Francisco, she worked in a fortune cookie factory with An-mei Hsu, who introduced her to her second husband, Tin Jong. They have three children: Winston, who is killed in a car accident at the age of sixteen, Vincent, and Waverly.

Waverly Jong

Waverly Jong, a thirty-six-year-old divorcee with a five-year-old daughter, Shoshana. Waverly is a tax attorney in San Francisco. When she was nine years old, she won national attention as a chess champion. She is insecure and fears that her mother will reject her new fiancé.

An-mei Hsu

An-mei Hsu, the wife of George Hsu and mother of Janice, Ruth, Rose, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Bing. Born in 1914, she was reared by her grandmother in Ningpo until she was nine. Her mother, the widow of a respected scholar, brought disgrace on herself by becoming the third concubine of Wu Tsing, a rich merchant in Tientsin, and she eventually poisoned herself. An-mei worries that her daughter Rose will not see the choices open to her.

Rose Hsu Jordan

Rose Hsu Jordan, the third of An-mei’s seven children. When she was fourteen, she saw her four-year-old brother Bing fall off a pier at a family outing and felt responsible for his death. In college, she married Ted Jordan, a dermatologist, whom she allowed to make all the decisions in their marriage. When Ted announces that he wants a divorce after fifteen years, Rose must figure out how to stand up for what she wants.

Ying-ying St. Clair

Ying-ying St. Clair, the wife of an American man who calls her “Betty.” Born in 1914 in Wushi to a wealthy family, she was married at sixteen to a philanderer who abandoned her, causing her to induce the abortion of her first child. She married Clifford St. Clair in 1946, after the death of her first husband. They have a daughter, Lena, and a son who dies at birth.

Lena St. Clair

Lena St. Clair, a thirty-six-year-old designer at her husband’s architectural firm. After college, she married self-centered and success-oriented Harold Livotny and inspired him to start his own business. After five years of marriage, he still splits their expenses down the middle even though he makes seven times as much as she does.

Characters

(BEACHAM'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR FICTION)

The main characters in this novel are four women: China-born Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair; and their four daughters, American-born Jing-mei "June" Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. Some readers have expressed difficulty in sensing a distinctness among the four mothers and the four daughters. The voices seem, at least on a first reading, too similar.

But if there is similarity in their voices and a sameness to the daughters' complaints about growing up Chinese-American, there is a brilliance of detail and individuality in the lives of the four women from China, who met and formed the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club in 1949. One cannot forget the picture of Suyuan Woo, fleeing Kweilin before the approaching Japanese army, leaving behind first her suitcases, then her food, and at last the twin daughters she could no longer carry. Or Linda Jong, getting out of a matchmaker marriage by her wits, getting to Peking, and getting out of the country. Or Ying-ying St. Clair and her stories of falling into Tai Lake at the celebration of the Moon Festival. Or An Mei Hsu, with her memories of her sad and bitter mother, the unhappy fourth wife of a wealthy man.

The daughters show varying degrees of success, American-style. Waverly, learning to play with a cast-off chess set donated by Baptist ladies, becomes a chess prodigy; June is accused by her mother of being a "college drop-off;" Rose is being divorced by her dermatologist husband; Lena has a "balanced" marriage with a successful architect — balanced down to every dollar. One thing that unites all eight voices is their expression of things they wish they could communicate to one another.