The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of plot: Twentieth century

Locale: China and San Francisco

Principal Characters

• Jing-mei (June) Woo, the protagonist
• Suyuan Woo, Jing-mei’s mother
• Rose Hsu Jordan, a homemaker
• An-mei Hsu, Rose’s mother
• Waverly Jong, a businesswoman
• Lindo Jong, Waverly’s mother
• Lena St. Clair, an architect
• Ying-ying St. Clair, Lena’s mother

The Story

After Suyuan Woo passes away, her daughter, Jing-mei, is asked by her mother’s friends to take her mother’s place as a member of their Joy Luck Club, a group of friends who play Mah-Jongg together. At first, Jing-mei is reluctant to join the club. She is not very good at Mah-Jongg and not particularly interested in hearing her “aunties” talk about the past. Once she accepts, however, she begins to learn more about her mother’s past and about the twin daughters her mother left in China. She also learns about her aunties’ lives and about their daughters.

The aunties describe their childhood experience in China and their journey to the United States. An-mei Hsu recalls how her mother was mistreated by her husband’s family after his death, and how she was disowned by Popo, her mother, for marrying Wu Tsing, who already had a wife and two concubines. When Popo became very sick, An-mei’s mother nevertheless returned home to take care of her. An-mei later learned from a servant, Yan Chang, that her mother had been raped by Wu Tsing and tricked into the marriage, and that she was physically abused and emotionally tortured by Wu Tsing’s wife and concubines.

Lindo Jong was a child bride. Her husband, Tyan-yu, was several years younger than she and even more immature. When Huang Taitai, Tyan-yu’s mother, became angry with Lindo for not bearing the family a son, Lindo told her that from a meeting she had with the ghosts of the family’s ancestors she was warned to leave the family to prevent calamity from descending on them. That trick enabled Lindo to leave Huang Taitai’s house without disgracing her own family. The money Huang Taitai gave her was enough for her to go to America.

Ying-ying St. Clair was born to a well-to-do family, and she was brought up with strict rules about how to behave properly. Both her mother and Amah, the maid, believe that a “girl can never ask, only listen”; while a “boy can run and chase dragonflies, because that is his nature . . . a girl should stand still.” In the legendary figure Chang-o, the Moon Lady, Ying-ying finds a companion and someone she can trust, but after Ying-ying makes a secret wish to Chang-o while watching a play, she is shocked to find out that the person who plays Chang-o is a man.

The aunties’ daughters also tell their stories about the cultural conflicts they experienced growing up in America. Waverly Jong was Chinatown’s chess champion when she was a child, but because she did not like the way her mother bragged about her achievement, she stopped playing. Lately, Waverly was fighting her mother over the way she treats her boyfriend, Rich Shields; it seems that her mother considers neither Rich nor Waverly’s former Chinese husband good enough.

Lena St. Clair is tired of hearing her mother talk about how her marriage with Harold Livotny is unbalanced. She eventually comes to think that her mother was right all along and that she and her husband do not have an equal relationship. Lena is as important as Harold in the architectural firm Livotny and Associates but is not paid accordingly; yet they split the household bills and expenses evenly in half.

In the story “Half and Half,” Rose Hsu Jordan sees a parallel between what happens to her brother Bing and what happens to her marriage. When Rose was a teenager, she was once given the responsibility to take care of her younger brothers while the family was vacationing on a beach. A misunderstanding between Rose and her father results in Bing’s disappearance. From that incident, Rose learns that fate is shaped “half by expectation, half by inattention.” Just as she knows now that she never expects to find Bing, Rose now also knows she will not find a way to save her marriage to Ted Jordan, who not only does not respect her being a housewife but also has an affair with another woman.

Jing-mei Woo is the spokesperson for both her and her mother. When Jing-mei was a child, Suyuan believed that her daughter was a prodigy and hired a piano teacher for her. Jing-mei was not very excited about playing piano, however, and did not practice hard. After a disastrous appearance on a talent show, Jing-mei has a big altercation with her mother, after which she never touches the piano again. After her mother dies, Jing-mei develops a sentimental attachment to the piano, and one day she plays Robert Schumann’s piano pieces “Pleading Child” and “Perfectly Contented” a few times and discovers that they are “two halves of the same song.”

When the aunties give Jing-mei an envelope with twelve hundred dollars and tell her to go to China to meet her twin sisters, she starts to understand the ontological significance of having taken her mother’s place at the Mah-Jongg table—on the East, where things began. In the last story of the book, “A Pair of Tickets,” Jing-mei Woo describes her trip to China in search of her “lost” twin sisters. When she finally meets them, Jing-mei can see that together they look just like their mother.

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