The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

About the Author: “Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California in 1952 to a father educated as an engineer in Beijing and a mother raised in a well-to-do Shanghai family. She grew up in an American world that was utterly remote from the childhood world of her parents” (Dodson). “When her father and older brother both died from brain tumors in 1966, she moved with her mother and younger brother to Europe, where she attended high school in Montreux, Switzerland. She returned to the United States for college” (“Amy Tan Biography”).

The Joy Luck Club In The Joy Luck Club, Tan’s first novel, short-story- like vignettes alternate back and forth, telling the stories of four Chinese women and their American- born daughters. This book is a meditation on the divided nature of immigrant life. It is also, at least to some extent, the story of mothers and daughters everywhere. A Chinese or Jewish or Presbyterian mother broods when an adult daughter says, "I'm my own person!" Her response is "How can she be her own person? When did I give her up?" (Dodson)

Narrative Structure ➢ “The novel is organized into four distinct chapters. The first relates to the separate lives of the mothers; the next two focus on the daughter's stories; the last chapter returns to the mothers. ➢ “At first, the novel may seem somewhat difficult to follow, somewhat disjointed. However, as the story progresses the reader begins to appreciate just how the disjunctions work for, rather than against, the novel. While we as readers grope to know whose mother or grandmother is getting in an unfamiliar ceremony, or why a concubine is committing suicide, we are ironically being reminded not just of the nightmare of being a woman in traditional China, but of the enormity of the confusing, mental journey Chinese emigrants had to make. And, most ironic, we are also reminded by these literary disjunctions that it is precisely this mental chasm that members of the younger generation must now recross in reverse in order to resolve themselves as whole Chinese-Americans” (Dodson).

The Mothers Suyuan Woo An-mei Hsu Lindo Jong Ying-ying St. Clair The Daughters Jing-mei “June” Woo Rose Hsu Jordan Waverly Jong Lena St. Clair

Works Cited “Amy Tan Biography.” The Biography.com website. A&E Television Networks. n.d. Web. 3 January Dodson, Mary. “Joy Luck Club Background Information.” Amarillo College. Amarillo College. n.d. Web. 3 January 2016.