When I failed to become a concert pianist, or even an accompanist for the church youth choir, she finally explained that I was late-blooming, like Einstein, who everyone thought was retarded until he discovered a bomb.” “She did housework for an old retired piano teacher down the hall who gave me lessons and free use of a piano to practice on in exchange. “At first my mother tried to cultivate some hidden genius in me,” recalls June.

What she yearns for is to lead an independent, modern and American life free of the burden of her parents’ Chineseness and the overweening hopes for their children that they can’t even “begin to express in their fragile English.” She is made uncomfortable by the older generation’s insistence on maintaining old customs and parochial habits, which she views as an impediment to breaking loose from her parents’ cultural gravity. But she feels uncomfortably out of place in this unassimilated environment among older women who still wear “funny Chinese dresses with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches of embroidered silk sewn over their breasts,” and who meet in one another’s houses, where “too many once fragrant smells” from Chinese cooking have been “compressed onto a thin layer of invisible grease.” The all-too-Chinese ritual of the Joy Luck Club has always impressed her as little more than a “shameful Chinese custom, like the secret gathering of the Ku Klux Klan or the tom-tom dances of TV Indians preparing for war.” When one of the women dies, her daughter, Jing-mei (June) Woo, is drafted to sit in for her at the game.

The members of the Joy Luck Club are four aging “aunties” who gather regularly in San Francisco to play mah-jongg, eat Chinese food and gossip about their children. The book is a meditation on the divided nature of this emigrant life. In “The Joy Luck Club,” her first novel, short-story-like vignettes alternate back and forth between the lives of four Chinese women in pre-1949 China and the lives of their American-born daughters in California.

THE JOY LUCK CLUB by Amy Tan | Review first published March 19, 1989īorn in Oakland, Calif., in 1952 to a father educated as an engineer in Beijing and a mother raised in a well-to-do Shanghai family, Amy Tan grew up in an American world that was utterly remote from the childhood world of her parents.

The joy luck club book online