When Amy Tan published The Joy Luck Club in 1989, it spent 40 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, was nominated for a National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the hearts of millions of readers. A modern classic, The Joy Luck Club follows the tenuous and tender relationship between four Chinese women and their American-born daughters.
The novel centers themes of identity, belonging, and inheritance as the women recount their journeys to America and try to impart lessons and inheritances on their daughters. Faced with cultural differences and language barriers, each woman shares a sacred bond with their daughter, even as their relationships are often thorny.
Tan perfectly structures the novel to reflect these themes. The book is split into four sections: Feathers From A Thousand Li Away, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, American Translation, and Queen Mother of the Western Skies, alternating between chapters focusing on the mothers and daughters, respectively. Yet there are also subtle metaphoric ties that bind the mothers and daughters together despite their differing experiences. Tan uses these recurring motifs to convey the lessons and inheritances the mothers strive to pass on to the daughters and establish the distinctions of each of their differing relationships.
Suyuan and June Woo: Lost in Translation
Suyuan and June Woo’s story is slightly different from the others, as Suyuan has died shortly before the events of the novel take place. Therefore, her story is filtered through the perspective of her daughter June, as she navigates grief and tries to reconcile the memory of her mother and the lessons she tried to impart. June is the only character to have a chapter in all four sections of the novel, serving as a mouthpiece for her mother’s story.
Central to June and Suyuan’s relationship is the theme of translation, which occurs on both a literal and metaphoric level. June speaks limited Chinese, and therefore struggles with the language barrier in communicating with her mom. She states, “My mother and I spoke two different languages, I talked to her in English and she answered back in Chinese.” This physical language barrier also represents a cultural divide. June reflects that the women of the Joy Luck Club “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.”
June is also translating the divide of death, bringing her mother’s story and message from the other side. She recounts the story of how Suyuan fled the Japanese army during World War II, and in doing so, left behind a pair of twins: daughters, whom she tried to bring with her but lost on the road out of the city of Kweilin. June meeting her long-lost sisters at the end of the novel symbolizes her ability to finally overcome the gaps of language, culture, and even death, finally understanding her mother.
When June and her sisters finally meet, they take a picture using a Polaroid camera, which itself is a form of translation, and June states: “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.”
Finally, June no longer has to translate, and can simply understand and relate to her sisters despite the difference in their experiences. They connect in shared love and grief over the loss of their mother.
An-mei and Rose Hsu: Too Little Wood
The central thematic tie that binds An-mei and her daughter Rose is one of passivity and helplessness. Both struggle with standing up for themselves and stepping into their own autonomy. An-mei is described by Suyuan via June as having “no spine” and missing the element of wood. June states, “Too little wood and you bent too quickly to listen to other people’s ideas, unable to stand on your own. This was like my auntie An-mei.”
Rose, who is going through a divorce, inherits her mother’s passivity. In describing her relationship with her husband Ted, she states, “I was victim to his hero. I was always in danger and he was always rescuing me. I would fall and he would lift me up. It was exhilarating and draining. The emotional effect of saving and being saved was addicting to both of us. And that, as much as anything we ever did in bed, was how we made love to each other: conjoined where my weakness needed protection.”
An-mei, too, inherits this passivity from her own mother, who was assaulted by a wealthy man and forced to become his concubine. Eventually, An-mei’s mother resisted the only way she was able to, by committing suicide with an overdose of opium. An-mei reflects on this inherited passivity, stating: “I was raised in the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way…All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.”
Eventually, Rose stands up to Ted. While she cannot fight the divorce, she demands to keep her home, which Ted wants to live in with his new girlfriend. With weeds appearing as a symbol throughout the chapter, Rose states: “You can’t just pull me out of your life and throw me away.”
Lindo and Waverly Jong: The Force of Wind
Both headstrong, willful, and fiercely independent, Lindo and Waverly Jong are engaged in a lifelong power struggle. Waverly, who as a child was a chess prodigy, is flaunted around by her mother. As an adult, Waverly struggles to regain her mother’s affection and approval. She sees her mother as a master manipulator whose harsh judgment causes Waverly to change her mind toward everything in her life, particularly her romantic partners.
Throughout both Lindo and Waverly’s chapters, wind becomes a recurring motif that both characters use to find their strength and make decisions. When she was a child playing chess, Waverly would ignore Lindo’s advice that “the strongest wind cannot be seen” because it didn’t have any practical application in chess. But later, after a fight with her mother, she states: “I felt myself growing light. I rose up into the air and flew out the window. Higher and higher above the alley, over the tops of tiled roofs, where I was gathered up by the wind and pushed up toward the night sky until everything below me disappeared and I was alone.”
Lindo, as a young woman, entered into an arranged marriage with a family that treated her poorly. On the night of her wedding, the candle that is supposed to represent her everlasting tie to her husband is blown out by the wind. Lindo sees this, as well as the servant girl who was supposed to watch the candle but has fallen asleep, and manipulates her in-laws so that they terminate the marriage and wed their son to the servant instead.
Wind, therefore, becomes symbolic of Lindo and Waverly’s shared ability to manipulate situations in their favor. And while it is often the exact thing that makes their relationship challenging, it is also what unites them and allows them to fully understand one another.
Ying-ying and Lena St. Clair: The Power of Prediction
Ying-ying and Lena’s chapters are some of the book’s most surreal, which is due to the pair’s shared ability to predict the future. These predictions accompany an implied struggle with mental illness that the pair experiences. Therefore, while they have premonitions about what is going to happen in the future, there is little they feel they can do to prevent the inevitable.
Lena recalls how, as a child, her mother was plagued by “unspoken terrors” that “surrounded our house, that chased my mother until she hid in a secret dark corner of her mind.” When Ying-ying gets pregnant, she knows ahead of time that the baby will die, but is unable to prevent the tragedy from playing out.
Lena, too, sees “terrible things,” she says, “I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me I got from my mother.” In her marriage, Lena and her husband financially split everything equally, despite the fact that he earns more than her. She is unhappy with the arrangement and can see it getting more and more harmful, but cannot find a way to change her situation. When Ying-ying comes over to visit, a table Lena’s architect husband has built collapses. “I know it would happen,” Lena says. “Then why didn’t you stop it?” Ying-ying replies.
Later in the book, Ying-ying revealed that she was married to a man in China who abandoned her while she was pregnant. She states, “Even when I was my happiest, I had a worry that started right above my brow, where you know a thing. This worry later trickled down to my heart, where you feel a thing and it becomes true.”
Alone and pregnant, Ying-ying gets an abortion. She hides this traumatic experience for years, even after losing the baby in the United States. Eventually, Ying-ying realizes that the only way to save Lena is to share her story, that her predictive powers are nothing without an acknowledgement of the past.
In the powerful closing paragraph of her chapter, Ying-ying states, “I will see a thing that has already happened. The pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear… I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter’s tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because that is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because that is the way a mother loves her daughter.”
