The Joy Luck Club is a cycle of short stories more than a novel. This has become an increasingly popular way to write novels, but Amy Tan seems to have been ahead of the curve, since this book is now more than 25 years old. More recent books such as The Lord of Misrule, Olive Kittridge, and A Visit from the Goon Squad come to mind. There are older examples: Alice Munro has played with this concept for years (various stories in Runaway have related or recurring characters), and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is an even older example.
The idea is to use recurrent characters or places in a series of freestanding short stories. It is an efficient way to write a novel, because it allows the writer to complete and polish each chapter as a separate entity without having to worry about transitions between them. It also makes timelines easier to create, since the independent short stories can have overlapping time frames or be years apart. And flashbacks, which require some linking to the overall plot in the traditional novel, can be executed by simply ending one story and starting another at an earlier time. No explanation necessary. A flexible concept.
The Joy Luck Clubis a collection of sixteen short stories about a group of four women who emigrated from China to San Francisco right after World War II, and about their often strained relationships with their daughters. Each of the mothers gets two short stories, and each of the daughters gets two. This presents us with another characteristic of the novel of linked short stories — since each story can have its own protagonist, the book can have multiple protagonists.
For this book, that would be eight protagonists. One might assume, and would be correct in assuming, that eight protagonists would make a novel very crowded and confusing. This was the case with Joy Luck, at least for me — I had trouble remembering which daughter went with which mother and who was born where and who divorced whom. Tan seems to be conscious of this and has occasional asides that help refresh the reader’s memory, but if you are not the kind of reader willing to flip back a hundred pages to remind yourself of previous stories, you may find the book a bit challenging (and prefer the movie instead — faces are easier to attach stories to than names in a book!).
Nevertheless, the book deserves its reputation; it is as popular now as it was when it came out a quarter century ago. (It was even included as one of the 100 great novels in the PBS Great American Read this past year.) Tan’s genius was in putting Chinese cultural thinking at the center of the novel. Not just the Tiger Mom, but the Chinese traditional religious beliefs, the importance of ancestry, and social class. These ides permeated the book and lifted it out of the cliches of typical mother-daughter stories, or immigration stories.
The ending was very affecting. In the last story, one of the daughters returns to China after her mother dies, not in place of her mother, but, in a spiritual sense, as her mother. This sense of ancestry, that future generations do not just succeed the previous ones but actually embody the hopes and dreams of their forbears, is a very powerful concept, an argument convincing even to the Western reader. It clarified the other mother daughter relationships in the novel, which mostly seemed antagonistic, but in light of the final chapter appear more to be a misunderstanding between the mothers and the children. The mothers simply want to transfer their hopes and dreams to their children, just as they accepted the hopes and dreams of their parents. Trying to do so in a new country proves to be almost impossible -- with the emphasis on almost. The book emotionally resolves when the daughters re-interpret the aggression of their mothers as a desire to pass on hope and love.
I can see why some Chinese-Americans would feel the book promotes Asian stereotypes. (Search the internet for “hate Amy Tan” and see what you get.) The mothers are traditional Chinese and their voices and life stories resemble the the views and stories Americans might expect traditional Chinese women to have. And the daughters seem to react to their mothers in typical California Valley Girl ways — dismissive, rebelling, and with a shrug. Surely not all Asian mother-daughter relationships are this way. Although in Tan’s defense — and this isn’t just a defense, it is the final word — as an Asian-American herself Tan has a right to write about the Asian-American world as she encountered it. If the stories here aren’t legitimately her experience, that’s a different matter, but I assume that they are. And if so, she has every right to express them.
But the stuff about one daughter saying her mom came over from a “slow boat to China,” another daughter being a chess genius, two of the mothers working in a fortune cookie factory when they arrive in San Francisco, and all the talk about how Americans don’t have discipline…well, I can see the problem.