The Joy Luck Club

Despite being aware of this book when it came out and all the acclaim it immediately garnered, I've been about twenty years late to this book. It was well worth the wait. And I'm sure I got more from it now than I would have then, as my own relationship with my mother has evolved over the years.Because that's what this book is about: mothers who don't understand their daughters, and daughters who only very gradually begin to understand their mothers. Add to this a cultural shift from Chinese-born mothers to American-born daughters, and those relationships take on yet another distortion that challenges even the best of intentions to connect.There's so much about this book I loved: the complex lives with rich backstory, the complicated relationships, the quirky personalities (especially of the mothers), and the wonderful way Tan used those characters to flip my view of the USA. "So-so security" rather than "social security" is one phrasing I'll always remember.Perhaps because I was so eager to see what was happening with these characters that I read more quickly than I should have, or perhaps because the cultural differences between me and the characters were deep, but the characters were often blurred for me. I was grateful for the little cheat sheet, the character list, to help me keep everyone straight.The Joy Luck club is everything wonderful you've heard it is -- but you'll get more than a good read out of it. Much more. It will touch you personally in ways you won't expect, and open your eyes to a world that's probably been invisible to you. This is a rare gift from a book, and one you won't want to pass by.

Delightful and thoughtful book to read

New to the Bay Area, I was excited to read a book set in SF, recognizing landmarks and local spots along the way. I was not prepared for this book to wreck me. The transitions between the mothers’ and daughters’ voices were so honest and true. She captured the mother-daughter relationship perfectly. I found myself having lightbulb moments all over the place. I’m looking forward to rereading this book.

I first read this book years ago but am glad my book club led me to reread it! It's an amazing, heartfelt book that covers the complexities of not just mother/daughter relationships but what happens when cultures clash.

Some writing and undelining. Not a problem. The book is perfectly useable for my research.

“The door is open, but the room is dark, so I call out, ‘Ma?’ I see it right away: the marble end table collapsed on top of its spindly black legs. Off to the side is the black vase, the smooth cylinder broken in half, the freesias strewn in a puddle of water. And then I see my mother sitting by the open window indie, her dark silhouette against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I can’t see her face. ‘Fallen down,’ she says simply. She doesn’t apologize. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. ‘I knew it would happen.’ ‘Then why you don’t stop it?’ asks my mother. And it’s such a simple question.”(From the chapter titled “Rice Husband”)

Got this book for an assignment and ended up loving it !

I must have watched the film a dozen times. Something about it kept me enraptured. Maybe it was because I was myself a child of immigrants (Russian rather than Chinese). The movie spoke to me about the sadness of cultural conflict between a parent who tries so hard to instill a certain cultural awareness in a child who resists it. So I finally decided to read the book. While it was jarring, it was also a personal story that left me wondering about my own history and that of my parents. For that I am thankful to the author for sharing this story.The book is a far richer story than the movie was. By that I mean that there is more background, more history, and much more Chinese culture(s). And the language used is beautiful to read. Amy Tan manages to evoke an entire milieu with her words. But the movie was what I was used to. I tried to put aside the images from the movie, but I kept returning to it and while reading I kept thinking to myself that this was not how it was in the movie.So, the book. It is a story about 4 Chinese women and their 4 Chinese-American daughters. The book is set up in 16 chapters so that we get the perspective of all 4 mothers and their 4 daughters respectively, although since one mother has died, that part of the book is told from the perspective of the deceased woman's husband and daughter. In mainland China this woman, Suyuan Woo, was displaced during the war (Chinese-Japanese War during the 30s and 40s) and formed a Joy Luck Club that would play mahjong while sharing the joys and sadness in each others' lives. Now displaced again because of the Japanese invasion, Suyuan forms another Joy Luck Club in San Francisco in 1949, where she met the other 3 Chinese mothers through a local church.In the book, and in the film, we see the backgrounds of the mothers in China. The stories are varied although there is an undercurrent of tragedy in all of them. Those were not easy times to live in China and certainly not as a woman. We are witness to an entire sociocultural world that somehow only gets transplanted in bits and pieces to the United States. This creates serious tensions in all four of the mother-daughter relationships as the mothers and daughters live in different worlds even while inhabiting the same space. So in addition to the usual generation gap, there is also a cultural gap. The mothers have all their history from China while the daughters all have their own emotional issues to deal with as children of immigrants in a new society. As they try to understand each other, the story progresses so that by the end, when we return to China, we see that an emotional bridge has been created between mother and daughter. A bridge that allows the gap to be crossed.

Ok

The book arrived speedily and in perfect conditions. The cover is beautiful, as is usual with the Penguin Orange Collection. The cover has a matte finish to it, and the pages are of a not-too-white shade, which makes the reading comfortable. The stories of the four families are very interesting. So far, an excellent acquisition.

A really good reading, it tells a fiction story but also so true! The complicated relationship between mothers and daughters!

I enjoyed this story of Asian families settling in the US, each with their own background and story. Their stories were very special. What a good name for a group!

Fantastic. That's all I can say.