From my experience, teaching about a book is the best way to learn about it. In teaching a recent class on The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Amy Tan (see photo Below) for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Richmond (VA), I wanted to understand why this book was an unexpected New York Times bestseller from the late 1980s to the mid-nineties. After teaching it, I was delighted, but not too surprised, to discover that my students, “ages 55 and better,” thought that it held even more appeal today than it did decades ago.
Since it was first published, The Joy Luck Club has sold about 20 million copies, and it has been translated into 25 languages. We still find it prominently displayed in both American and Chinese bookstores. Many English teachers over the intervening years have assigned it as mandatory reading. Scholars have proclaimed this book as a top-shelf literary classic. An extensive yearlong reader’s poll called the PBS Great American Read, assigned it as the 42nd best book. Not bad, considering it fell right after a top-five favorite of mine, The Count of Monte Cristo. And, it was ranked just ahead of Frankenstein and Moby Dick!
Since Tan’s book is written by the daughter of Chinese immigrants and is about Chinese families, it is easy to conclude that at least part of its success is that it spoke to the growing Asian immigrant population in the United States. Chinese and other Asian groups were flocking to America throughout the twentieth century, and up until Tan’s novels, there were very few literary works that accurately described what they were experiencing.
The rise of Asians in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century has been well documented. The Pew Research Center reported on the doubling of America’s Asian-American populations— from 3.5 million to 6.9 million in the 1980s. This population increased again from 11 million in 2000 to over 22 million in 2020. The Study concluded that Asians are currently the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S, and that today, they make up about 6% of America’s population. Tan’s groundbreaking book spoke to many of them because Asians share many similar views about culture and family dynamics.
Another major boost for The Joy Luck Club came in 1993 when Amy Tan agreed to supervise the screenplay of her widely acclaimed book. The result of this effort produced what is, in my opinion, one of the best classic book-to-film adaptations. Not surprisingly, the book rose to the bestseller’s list again after the movie. Our class considered movies with Chinese characters before that period, such as Charlie Chan with fake Chinese actors or those portraying stereotypical Chinese roles with phony accents and mustaches.
With its overwhelming sales and acclaim, we must conclude that even with such a significant population boom, the book’s popularity had to extend far beyond all the Asian groups. My senior-age students reported that the film still held a powerful emotional appeal when they viewed it early in 2022.
The book and film follow four mothers who immigrated from China during and after World War II and their four daughters who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The stories make for compelling reading and the characters are powerful and realistic. According to Tan, they are based on “bits of pieces” of her and her real-life mother. However, one common conclusion from my students, was that the book seemed much different in 2022 than when we read it in the previous decade. In the 1980s, we Baby Boomers were peaking in the United States and becoming adults. All 4 daughters in the book were born right after World War II and were also considered Boomers. Therefore, many of us first read the book through the eyes of the daughters—who were then close to our age group. With our re-reading, many students identified with the 4 mothers—who were then close to our present age group of students.
The stories are told alternatively through the points of view of the Chinese mothers, then through their daughters. We learn about how the mothers struggled in China and America. They told many of their stories while playing the Chinese game of Mahjong. However, their efforts appear to be doomed because they were trying to convey a pure version of Chinese culture, as their young daughters appeared to turn deaf ears.
From the mothers, we learn about their horrifying experiences with bad in-laws and marriage relations in China, being neglected and abandoned, and losing their status and confidence. The four daughters tell us about their struggles to be recognized as Americans, how their mothers pressured them to be prodigies, issues about their bad marriages, and their inability to communicate with their mothers or respect their ways of thinking. These challenges become increasingly difficult since their daughters were trying to forge new ways of adjusting to growing up in the United States. Through sixteen separate, but interwoven stories, the book questions whether it is even possible to have a new Chinese American identity, as it often tends to become a blend of the best and worst of both cultures.
However, it is easy to observe from the above examples, that the mother/daughter issues that Tan describes are not exclusive to Asian families. They are universal and could commonly be found in almost any family. This is another reason that The Joy Luck Club received and still has such a universal appeal. The book therefore was and still remains popular with Asians, as well as other ethnic and non-ethnic readers.
Our students, who were mostly women, commented most on the ways that The Joy Luck Club vividly illustrated how language difficulties and cultural assumptions contributed to numerous misunderstandings and damaging relations between the four native language-speaking immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. By the final class, they understood that each of the mother/daughter pairs was trying to rise to the new American ‘Rules of the Game.’ And they concluded that Chinese mother-daughter conflicts might have just as well been seen in stories about Irish, Italian, Jewish, or Latin American immigrant families; although they might have each been spiced a bit differently.
One seminal example of this from Irish American literature, that highlights mother-daughter conflicts, is Betty Smith’s 1943 book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (# 13 on the PBS Great American Read list). The protagonist’s daughter, Francie, has an imaginative literary bent, while her mother goads her to have a practical 1940s traditional woman’s approach to her life. Smith best captured the flavor and family dynamics and neighborhood settings of Irish Americans and Germans who immigrated to Brooklyn after World War I. Our students looked at passages in the two books about ethnic grocery stores in Brooklyn and San Francisco.
Here, Francie, a young Irish American girl, recalls and narrates her visit to a Jewish delicatessen in Brooklyn:
The little Jewish delicatessen was full of Christians buying Jew rye bread. She watched the man push her quarter loaf into a paper bag. With its wonderful crisp yet tender crust and floury bottom, it was easily the most wonderful bread in the world, she thought when it was fresh. She entered Sauerwein’s store reluctantly. Sometimes he was agreeable about the tongue and sometimes he wasn’t. Sliced tongue at seventy-five cents a pound was only for rich people. But when it was nearly all sold, you could get the square end for a nickel if you had a pull with Mr.Sauerwein. Of course, there wasn’t much tongue to the end. It was mostly soft, small bones and gristle with only the memory of meat! It happened to be one of Sauerwein’s agreeable days. “The tongue came to an end yesterday,” he told Francie. “But I saved it for you because I know your mama likes tongue and I like your mama. You tell her that. Hear? Yes sir,” whispered Francie. “She looked down on the floor as she felt her face getting warm. She hated Mr. Sauerwein and would not tell mama what he had said.”
In a strikingly tone-similar passage, Waverly Jong, a young Asian- American narrator, who is named after the street where she was born, recalls and narrates her visit to a fish market in San Francisco’s, Chinatown. I picked a selection in the story for my students to consider, titled, “Rules of the Game” from The Joy Luck Club because they both highlighted inter-textual associations between the two passages:
The front window of Ping Yuen Fish Market displayed a tank crowded with doomed fish and turtles struggling to gain footing on the slimy, green-tiled sides. A hand-written sign informed tourists, “Within this store, is all for food, not for pet.” Inside the butchers, with their blood-stained white frocks deftly gutted the fish while customers cried out shouted, “Give me your freshest,” to which the butchers always protested, “All are freshest.”
Both passages are narrated by preteen daughters of immigrant families. Although young Francie was born in Brooklyn, she experienced life through the eyes of two sets of immigrant grandparents from Ireland and Germany. The two scenes also sharply describe ethnic neighborhood settings, using multi-sensory images involving vivid colors, scents, tourists and vendors with attitudes selling meat or fish. The two passages are both spiced with ethnic dialogue. We understand the plights of both pre-adolescent girls, both through the eyes of the neighborhoods they lived, and from the ways their mothers viewed the world.
Betty Smith and Amy Tan were the first most acclaimed authors who wrote novels about the experiences of ethnic families who immigrated to America. Both of these authors wrote interesting stories about memorable characters. Their first novels both served as models that opened up a flood gate of popular ethnic authors like Frank McCourt, who also describes the plight of the Irish in America in Angela’s Ashes (1996), and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose book, The Namesake (2003) portrays one man’s struggles growing up in an East Indian American family.
Tan followed The Joy Luck Club with other important works, like The Kitchen God’s Wife and A Hundred Secret Senses. She later wrote an autobiography, called The Opposite of Fate, and was featured prominently in a PBS produced a revealing documentary about her life. A flood gate of popular Chinese-based literature continues today from writers Lisa See (China Girls), Kevin Kwan (Crazy Rich Asians), and Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood). They are all quick to say that their successes were inspired by and made possible from the trails blazed by Amy Tan.
Why do you think readers rated The Joy Luck Club more popular than perennial classics such as Frankenstein or Moby Dick? What interested you most about this book or film in the 1990s, or in recent years? What do you most take away from it today?
Please write your comments in the dialogue box below, and I promise to respond to them. Thanks – Murray Ellison, Editor.
Please note your responses and questions in the dialogue box below – or send them to the Editor, Murray Ellison – ellisonms2@alumni.vcu.edu
Murray Ellison ‘retired’ as the Director of Community Corrections for the Virginia Department of Correctional Education in 2009. He earned a Master’s in English Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015, after gaining a previous Doctorate in Education from Virginia Tech University. His MA thesis, Edgar Allan Poe: Unravelling the Plot of the Universe, was published in 2015. He presented papers related to this work at the History of Science in Society (HSS) and the International Poe Conference in Boston in April 2022. He started Litchatte.com in 2016 and is its Chief Editor. He has been the Coordinator of the RVA Classic BookClub since 2017. He is an editor for the International Correctional Education Journal and Co-Editor of Mystic Verses (2016) by Dr. Shambhushivananda, and Editor of two forthcoming books by artist and literary critic, Paul Hosch. He’s a volunteer docent for the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, VA. He has also been teaching literature, music, and culture classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Richmond since 2016. He is married with 3 adult daughters and a granddaughter.
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