Amy Tan, a Chinese-American freelance writer, is known for her novel The Joy Luck Club, which is mainly based on her and her mother’s life experiences. She was born in 1952 in Oakland, California. However, after her brother and father dead in 1966, her family moved to Switzerland to start a new life. Then she returned to America for college, and finally obtained her doctor degree in linguistics at UC Berkeley. In 1987, when her mother was diagnosed with a severe illness, they came back to China and reunited with her half-sisters. Two years later, this novel was published and translated into 25 languages in the world. Besides this book, her other two novels The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) have also appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. The book is like a collection of diaries written by four couples of mothers and daughters: Jing-mei (June) Woo and Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu and Rose Hsu Jordan, Lindo Jong and Waverly Jong, as well as Ying-ying St.
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Clair and Lena St. Clair, except that June tells her mother’s stories in her vision. The mothers recall their childhood and youth in China in the first section, and struggle to help their daughters’ marriages in the final section. The middle two sections are told by the four daughters about their childhood relationships with their mothers and troubles of their marriages. The four sections seem to have no connection with each other, but actually they are interwoven by the order of time, Sino-US cultural conflicts especially in education and marriage, mother-daughter relations, and people’s attitudes toward their fates. The title “the joy luck club” jumped into my eyes and inflamed my curiosity about its literal and symbolic meanings, which are embedded in stories of the eight characters. Jing-mei has been the wife of a Chinese military officer. When she lives in Guilin, China, she joins the “joy luck club” where she and other married women hold feast to comfort each other while Japanese armies are marching approach them. On the way to get together with her husband, she has no more strength to afford her two baby girls so she drops them on the side of the road and leaves alone. She is tortured by the guilt of abandoning her daughters and she passes away before she could have the chance of reuniting with them. Luckily, Suyuan accomplishes her mother’s long-cherished wish although she used to disobey her mother. The second mother is An-mei, whose childhood is greatly changed after she lives with her mother, a concubine of a wealthy man. She witnesses how her mother suffers both physically and mentally. Her daughter, Rose has inherited a part of her personality, who finds herself difficult to make decisions or assert her opinion; also, this becomes the root cause of her broken marriage with Ted. With the help of An-mei, Rose finally looks directly to her heart and starts to pursue her own happiness. Lindo is from the same hometown as me, Taiyuan, Shanxi. Her marriage is settled down by parents and a matchmaker. Suffering from a disastrous flood, her family decides to move to the southern China and leaves her living with her new family, but then the loveless marriage and oppression from her mother-in-law prompt her to flee. Like her, her daughter Waverly is willful in playing chess and marrying the white man Rice. The last mother-daughter couple is Ying-ying and Lena. Ying-ying first is married to a fat rich man by her parents but her husband abandons her after she is pregnant; then, she aborts the baby and starts to earn her life independently as a saleswoman and later on gets married with a British man and settles in America, but this foreigner doesn’t understand her inner thoughts. Influenced by her personality and attitude toward marriage, her daughter Lena is trapped in her marriage with Harold Livotny, who insists that the couple should keep separate bank accounts. Besides the accessible language and engrossing plots that attract a number of readers, the profound motifs and values significantly contribute to the popularity of the book. One is about the cultural conflicts between China and America. Jing-mei’s
Clair and Lena St. Clair, except that June tells her mother’s stories in her vision. The mothers recall their childhood and youth in China in the first section, and struggle to help their daughters’ marriages in the final section. The middle two sections are told by the four daughters about their childhood relationships with their mothers and troubles of their marriages. The four sections seem to have no connection with each other, but actually they are interwoven by the order of time, Sino-US cultural conflicts especially in education and marriage, mother-daughter relations, and people’s attitudes toward their fates. The title “the joy luck club” jumped into my eyes and inflamed my curiosity about its literal and symbolic meanings, which are embedded in stories of the eight characters. Jing-mei has been the wife of a Chinese military officer. When she lives in Guilin, China, she joins the “joy luck club” where she and other married women hold feast to comfort each other while Japanese armies are marching approach them. On the way to get together with her husband, she has no more strength to afford her two baby girls so she drops them on the side of the road and leaves alone. She is tortured by the guilt of abandoning her daughters and she passes away before she could have the chance of reuniting with them. Luckily, Suyuan accomplishes her mother’s long-cherished wish although she used to disobey her mother. The second mother is An-mei, whose childhood is greatly changed after she lives with her mother, a concubine of a wealthy man. She witnesses how her mother suffers both physically and mentally. Her daughter, Rose has inherited a part of her personality, who finds herself difficult to make decisions or assert her opinion; also, this becomes the root cause of her broken marriage with Ted. With the help of An-mei, Rose finally looks directly to her heart and starts to pursue her own happiness. Lindo is from the same hometown as me, Taiyuan, Shanxi. Her marriage is settled down by parents and a matchmaker. Suffering from a disastrous flood, her family decides to move to the southern China and leaves her living with her new family, but then the loveless marriage and oppression from her mother-in-law prompt her to flee. Like her, her daughter Waverly is willful in playing chess and marrying the white man Rice. The last mother-daughter couple is Ying-ying and Lena. Ying-ying first is married to a fat rich man by her parents but her husband abandons her after she is pregnant; then, she aborts the baby and starts to earn her life independently as a saleswoman and later on gets married with a British man and settles in America, but this foreigner doesn’t understand her inner thoughts. Influenced by her personality and attitude toward marriage, her daughter Lena is trapped in her marriage with Harold Livotny, who insists that the couple should keep separate bank accounts. Besides the accessible language and engrossing plots that attract a number of readers, the profound motifs and values significantly contribute to the popularity of the book. One is about the cultural conflicts between China and America. Jing-mei’s