Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club Essay

, Research Paper

Kaitlin Sump

Amy Tan was born in 1952, in Oakland, California to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her family eventually settled in Santa Clara. When Tan was in her early teens, her father and one of her brothers died of brain tumors within months of each other. During this period Tan learned that her mother had been married before, to an abusive husband in China. After divorcing him, her mother fled China during the Communist takeover, leaving three daughters behind who she would not see again for nearly forty years.

After losing her husband and son, Daisy moved her family to Switzerland where Tan finished high school. During these years, mother and daughter argued over what Tan should do in college and afterwards. Tan eventually followed a boyfriend to attend college in San Jose, where she earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English and linguistics, despite her mother’s wish that she study medicine.

After Tan married her boyfriend, Lou DeMattei, she began to pursue a Ph.D. in linguistics, but she abandoned this endeavor to work with developmentally disabled children. Later, Tan struck out as a freelance business writer. Although she was successful, writing for corporate executives did not fulfill Tan. She began to write fiction as a creative release.

Meanwhile, her mother suffered a serious illness. Tan resolved to take a trip to China with her mother if she recovered. In 1987, after Daisy Tan returned to health, they traveled to China to visit the three daughters that Daisy had not seen for several decades and the three sisters Tan had never met. The trip provided Tan with a new perspective on her mother, and it proved to be the key inspiration for her first book, The Joy Luck, a collection of sixteen interlocking stories about the conflicts between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. Soon after its publication in 1989, The Joy Luck Club garnered enthusiastic reviews, and it remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than six months. It won both the National Book Award and the L.A. Times Book Award in 1989.

Tan continues to publish popular works. She often emphasizes that she writes primarily to create a work of art, not to portray the Chinese-American experience, that her bicultural upbringing is the source of inspiration for her work, not the end product.

Kaitlin Stump Contemporary Literature

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club contain stories about conflicts between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. The book mainly talked About Jing-mei’s trip to China to meet her half-sisters, Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa. Jing-mei’s mother, Suyuan, was forced to leave her twin babies on the roadside during her flee from the Japanese invasion of Kweilin. Suyuan intended to recover her children, but she failed to find them before her death. Finally, a after her mother’s life long search her mother received a letter from the two “lost” daughters. After Suyuan’s death, her mothers’ three friends in the Joy Luck Club, a weekly mahjong party that Suyuan started in China and later revived in San Francisco, urge Jing-mei to travel to China and tell her sisters about their mother’s life. But Jing-mei wonders whether she is capable of telling her mother’s story. Lindo, Ying-ying, and An-mei, members of The Joy Luck Club, do fear that Jing-mei might be right and that their own daughters may not really know them either.

The book tells different stories of each characters life, and in each story teaches a lesson or tells of the Chinese culture. For example, Chapter Two talks about An-mei’s grandmother raising her because she disproved of An-mei’s mother becoming a concubine. When Popo, An-mei’s mother is on her death bead, An-mei’s mother makes a soup and cuts a chunk of her skin off her arm and mixes it in with the soup out of respect for her mother although they didn’t get along. In Chapter Three it speaks of how Lindo was promised in marriage to Huang Tyan-yu when she was only two years old. They married when Lindo was sixteen years old, but the candle that is supposed to stay lit all night in order to symbolize lifelong loyalty even if her husband were to die was distinguished during the night so they were able to annul the marriage.

The book also shows how things that happen in childhood effect adult life. For example Rose, An-mei’s daughter was always responsible to care for her little brothers growing up. At the beach one day three of her brothers were fighting so she was told to break it up, but at that same time her youngest brother, Bing fell into the water without a trace. They looked everywhere for him but they gave up. They ended up finding Bing’s body the next morning. Later in her life Rose came to her mother telling her that she and her husband Ted were getting a divorce. They dated for many years before resulting in the both of them clinging to each other. Ted made all the decisions, but after he lost in a lawsuit he started to push Rose to make some of the decisions and said that she resisted in taking on any responsibility and blame. Her marriage was a result of her brother’s death and thinking although it was not her fault that it was her fault. Also another example of this is that Suyuan pushed her daughter, Jing-mei to become things that she was not. She wanted Jing-mei to become a pianist