Amy Tan’s blockbuster novel The Joy Luck Club understands the Bay Area as a threshold to new identities, depicting not only the deep international roots of many of California’s residents but also the chasm between younger generations and their immigrant parents.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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The novel’s protagonist Jing-mei Woo is asked to be “the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club” to fill her recently deceased mother’s place at the mahjong table. The book is narrated, in turn, by various “aunties” and their adult daughters, and chapters such as “Rules of the Game” and “Two Kinds” illustrate the disconnect between the former and the latter. “I failed her so many times,” Jing-mei says of her mother, “each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations.” Repeatedly, mothers are unable to let go of imagined ideals or to verbalize traumas, and their daughters turn away. Yet Tan beautifully crafts dialogue to create subtler tensions, even as she dramatizes the consequences of people falling short.
Tan has described a period before her debut when work by Chinese American authors was termed “ethnic,” assumed to be for “special readers,” not the mainstream. But The Joy Luck Club’s huge success opened doors for many other Asian American writers. Jing-mei’s San Francisco may separate her from her mother and her Chinese heritage, but it’s also a liminal space of discovery, where sharing stories permits reconnection.•
Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is a regular contributor to Alta Journal and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, where she serves as fiction chair. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Elk Grove, California.
