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Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989. 288 pgs.

The day I began writing this piece, a family of Chinese descent were killed in a shooting in Texas. This hit me hard because in Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, the novel I reread for the first time in a decade and taught recently, four Chinese immigrant families have trusted America for a better life after escaping the tyranny of a patriarchal society back home in China. I wonder if the thought of being killed in America while buying a cake for their child’s birthday, or while attending the wedding of a close friend they hadn’t seen in a long time, had ever crossed their mind. They probably didn’t think of it, nobody does, but the women knew that America is strange, it’s unfriendly and there is no culture there. Regardless, it was a country that gave them hope to survive.

Amy Tan’s brilliance lies not just in the interplay of words but in the depiction of empathy. It’s as if she has lived the life of each of her characters herself before writing about them. She empathises with the pain of mothers and the plight of the daughters. She empathises with the loneliness and the wars they are all fighting in their idiosyncratic way. The traumas that different generations face and the way they cope. This makes Amy Tan a brilliant storyteller, in addition to being an empathetic writer. That the whole novel is like a series of interconnected stories makes it even more inclusive of different points of view. The four Chinese mothers in the novel carry within themselves four different worlds, each eager to share this world with their not-so-eager American daughters. The complexity and conflicts of two distinct spaces lie here and the daughters don’t really break away from the past. An-Mei Hsu depicts her sullenness in this:

And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.

After becoming Americans and having new families, there is a clash between the old and the new worlds. The mothers, in imposing Chinese ways of living, meet with resistance from the daughters but neither of them understand ways to navigate these two spaces. To these older women, America is neither home nor heaven but a haven where they can begin their new life after struggling for a while. These are happy families but the women are all lonely. Some have lost their mothers in tragic circumstances while others have had to abandon their babies. But all of them have immense strength despite their tragic pasts.

The mothers are adamant that they don’t want to carry what might be called an immigrant’s burden. They know they would have had terrible lives in China, given the patriarchal violence and the Japanese invasion. But they still cook Chinese meals, show no interest in learning proper English (who decides what’s proper anyway) and disapprove of their American sons-in-law. The daughters are initially agitated by such impositions but soon reconcile and realise the hard-earned wisdom their mothers want to impart. The mothers are helping their daughters break the generational trauma, become assertive, learn to walk alone and never let anyone take advantage of them, including their spouses. They are learning to speak for themselves and not let anyone use them as goods. That is the beginning of feminism for them, right at home.

There is a sense of dreadful sadness in the narrative. Just like in any literature that deals with loss and displacement, sadness is ubiquitous in the novel. At times, Tan couples sadness with humour. The way mothers make fun of mental health treatment and talking to a psychiatrist is hilarious, despite the graveness of the subject. They think, for instance, “a psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really he’s just another bird drinking from your misery”.

The Joy Luck Club oozes hope and a will to survive. It may or may not bring joy, but it gives space to hope and resists sadness. This is indeed a dignified form of resistance, rebelling against the forces of sadness. All immigrants have a story that must be told and re-told. This is one such story that deserves to be read not once but multiple times.

How to cite: M, Fathima. “Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and the Will to Live.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 12 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/12/joy.

Fathima M is an assistant professor of English in Bangalore, India. She likes hoarding books and empty parks. [Read all contributions by Fathima M.]

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