"The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan

This is a book about mothers and daughters. Four Chinese women, living in San Francisco, meet every week to play Mah Jong and to discuss their jointly invested shares as members of the Joy Luck club. This book holds their stories and, for each woman, a story of one of their daughters. The book is in four quarters, each quarter having four stories although not all of the characters is represented equally. There is no formal plot to the book: each story is complete in itself, but each connects with the others of its dynasty, and together they combine to create a sort of bricolage on the theme of the experience of the Chinese woman, especially regarding those who live in America.

As an example of ethnic literature it reminded me very much of There, There by Tommy Orange who uses a similar collage-type effect to chart the lives of American Indians in modern urban America, although in Orange's book all the stories interweave to form a more conventional plot.


There are a lot of Chinese proverbs and ways of putting things:

• "The doctor said she died of a cerebral aneurysm. And her friends at the Joy Luck Club said she died just like a rabbit: quickly and with unfinished business left behind." (1.1)
• "We were a city of leftovers mixed together ... Everybody looked down on someone else. It didn't matter that everybody shared the same sidewalk to spit on and suffered the same fast-moving diarrhea. We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst." (1.1)
• "You think you can see something new, riding on top of a new cart. But in front of you, it is just the ass of the same old mule. Your life is what you see in front of you." (4.1)
• "Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth." (4.1)

There are some delightful descriptions:

• "A summer night that was so hot even the moths fainted to the ground, their wings so heavy with the damp heat." (1.1)

Other wonderful moments:

• "My mother used to say, 'Auntie Ying is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening'." (1.1)
• "After the baby died, my mother fell apart, not all at once, but piece by piece, like plates falling off a shelf one by one." (2.2)
• "Faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control. I found out the most I could have was hope." (2.3)
• "As if inspired by an old, unreachable, itch." (2.4)
• "We expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more" (3.1)
• "All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way." (4.1)

A beautifully written book with some wonderful characters but the sixteen stories are hard to comprehend as one so, for me, no overall picture emerged from the collage.

April 2020; 288 pages