Overview
A long time ago, when I was younger, my Japanese mother told me to read this book. At that time, it hadn’t occurred to me that this was the one thing my mother loved with her whole heart that was Chinese — but she loved this book, and even watched the movie with me, so I knew it was time to read it.
I got around to it during the last few days of 2023. From Amy Tan’s foreword, I instantly understood the power of the novel — the recollections of this woman who had taken stories from her Chinese-born mother, where she had listened and wrote everything down, much like I do with my mother’s stories reminiscing about an older time. It made me understand her story even from the first few pages, and the authenticity of Tan’s voice warned me that it was about to get really real.
The novel follows four American-born Chinese (ABC) women and their mothers, portraying the love, family, friendship and differences that create friction between our loved ones and drive us further away, and towards, one another.
I have realized, through this book, that my childhood was shared by others like me, people across the country who understand what it was like to both want to be and want not to be, to battle constantly between two things.
the asian mother
I felt deeply inspired by the accounts of each Chinese mother as they shared their stories across time and across Asia traveling to the west, each of them in their own way difficult and painful, equally lovely and horrifying.
Through the perspective of the Chinese mother, we explore the pros and cons of raising an American child: the child is left contemplating their Chinese conscious and their American conscious. The child thus has the power to remove parts of them that should, or shouldn’t, be removed.
we explore our chinese mothers’ worries throughout the text: was it a mistake to bring a daughter here? does she now not understand what it means to be chinese? has she lost something? has she gained something? something unwanted?
i liked that there was so much exploration of the asian mother-daughter relationship, the complexity of it, the confusion, the hatred, the joy; it showed such an accurate look inside what it means to grow up as an asian american woman. that you are american, but it’s also a lie. that you are asian but only inside, where no one can see.
the joy luck club portrays in the four chinese-american daughters, and maybe in all asian americans of our time, the strong beliefs that are growing inside us, but that are halted constantly by the asian mother’s voice — the pulsating, defeaning, loving, intrusive voice — the voice that tries to convey love but doesn’t know how. the voice that feels like it is holding you back instead of pushing you forward. the voice that is and isn’t, you. the voice you don’t know yourself without.
this was the most understood i have ever felt not only as an asian american reader, but as a first generation japanese american with a japanese born mother. it’s the closest i have ever felt a writer come in their effort to reach me, to tell me about my own upbringing, to tell me that they understood.
criticisms?
one thing i would have liked to see is tan’s exploration of the different voices of the asian woman; many times, the characters’ voices blended together and it wasn’t clear who was speaking. i think spending more time inside the characters and developing their personalities would have helped distinguish their voices and made them more appealing and intriguing. this is my only criticism of the novel.
american conscious; asian conscious
unlike my mother, i grew up reading contemporary asian american literature and got multiple perspectives on not only the asian experience in america, but also on that weird, uncomfortable space one writes from when caught between the asian and asian american.
i read fiction books like Pachinko (1/5 stars), autofiction like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (3/5 stars), and now, The Joy Luck Club (5/5 stars) — and instead of seeing the differences my mother saw with her Asian-born eyes, instead of duplicating her desire to distinguish ourselves from the rest, i saw only our similarities.
i grew up hearing my mother talk about how different china and japan were. from growing up in the states and also inside my mother’s head, i realized i could hear more if i just lifted my american head — i could see how the ideas she sometimes had about china were due to her being too deeply engrained inside her japanese identity, that it was partly because she failed to realize that, somewhere, she had china inside her too. that at the end of the day, they were our people and we were theirs.
inside my closest chinese friends, and inside myself too, i could see that what most of us really wanted was simply to understand each other. we have stepped shyly towards the newness of each other’s cultures, instead of away into the confines of our safe, individual worlds. we have reveled in our ability to read snippets of each others’ writing systems, we have eaten at both chinese and japanese restaurants, talked about the same show in different cultural adaptions, learned the difference in the meanings between “本当上手” in both languages, spent hours exchanging tidbits of history, gossiped about regional tendencies on who was likelier to be petty or to rip you off, tutored each other in chinese and japanese language courses.
every day we would learn a new word, how to say we were cold, how to say ‘good morning’ and to call each other ‘sweetheart’, and how to insult each other in the language that wasn’t ours — and all of this, all of this is part of me, even if i can’t call it my own.
and so i imagine, from the chinese mother’s perspective in the joy luck club, maybe from the thoughts that must have crossed my mother’s mind when she decided to start a family in america — i imagine our mothers assume that, by being born here, we have lost something.
i disagree. i think we have managed to keep what is ours, while adding also an awareness of others around us that our parents didn’t have: a desire to learn about what isn’t ourselves, to build an appreciation for what is difficult and uncertain, to what is new.
i can’t imagine that my mother’s generation had as much privilege as we do, the novelty and joy in cultural exchange. all of these tiny, beautiful details neither side would have known had we not opened ourselves, and been open, to the fact that we are both different and the same.
so, there is goodness in being asian, there is goodness in being american, and there is goodness in being both — but there is no goodness in remaining one thing, and refusing to learn about the confines that exceed our own bodies. the things that have nothing to do with us have everything to do with us; and i believe that as human beings, we have a responsibility to all of it.
bonus
one storytelling cultural crossover i found in ocean vuong’s vietnamese-american novel and amy tan’s asian american novel:
A child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard – little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Vuong, 21)
To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched – and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield.
and a snippet from the joy luck club:
But I often heard stories of a ghost who tried to take children away, especially strong-willed little girls who were disobedient. Many times Popo said aloud to all who could hear that my brother and I had fallen out of the bowels of a stupid goose, two eggs that nobody wanted, not even good enough to crack over the rice porridge. She also said this so that the ghosts would not steal us away. So you see, to Popo we were also very precious.
The Joy Luck Club (Tan, 33)
in some ways, we are still divided by our history; i still meet chinese-born people that dislike japanese people, and vice versa. i understand that to release history and to forgive is difficult. i spent many months working at a japanese supermarket this past summer, with the intention of gaining the experience working in a japanese company and using proper polite forms of speech.
what i hadn’t expected was to meet an old chinese man who worked as an exterminator. we would talk and ask each other questions, as we were often the last ones in the store.
i once asked him what he thought of japanese people, because i knew that while chinese friends my age were more open to us and less grudging about the past, an older person entrenched in history and knowledge and pride for their country might not be.
what he said surprised me — he said that he had come to america ages ago, and had brought his entire family with him. he knew our history well, and had his own opinion on it, but he told me that he understood, that he understood anger on both sides, understood why people held on to it. but it was in the past, and all the killing and war and hard feelings should be put aside, that japan and china had better things to do like become stronger, to help each other, to forgive.
thankfully, after each generation, we become more curious about one another, kinder, more receptive to our own differences. we were taught to remember our history, that to remember means to honor, and that we must repeat it by living it over and over again so we always remember the skin we cut open for our countries, in order to remain alive. we were taught that we have to remember pain, so that we prevent it from ever happening again.
i think that to remember scars is crucial, because who we were then is still part of us. but the past will keep getting farther away the more we open ourselves to each other.