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Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a gathering of sixteen interwoven stories about the conflict between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. The novel evolves around Jing-mei’s trip to China to meet her estranged half-sisters who were left in China by her mother during World War II. Her mother has just passed away and Jing-mei is on her way to deliver the mournful news.
In America, Jing-mei’s mother had gathered weekly to play mahjong with three of her oldest friends and fellow immigrants. The four women, all with daughters, made up the Joy Luck Club, which was organized in China and revived in San Francisco. The novel emphasizes the internal strife of parents, with completely different ways of think-ing, failing to understand the directions their children are taking. The women fear their children, “growing up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca cola than sor-row,” do not know or appreciate their parents struggle and hopes for their children, Asian heritage, or the stories of their mother’s lives.

The novel moves through generations, as the mothers each recall with astonishing clarity their relationships with their own mothers and worry that their daughters' recollec-tions of them will never possess the same intensity. However, although the children have become accustomed to the American lifestyle, they soon find solutions to their own prob-lems from their relationships with the older generation mothers and develop their own stories. Additionally, while the mothers struggle to help, understand, and support their daughters, they also learn more about themselves and grow in the process.

Tan has said that her intention in writing the novel was not to provide historical information, but rather to create a work of art, which is shown through the many univer-sal themes embedded within the novel. The four women’s relationships with their daugh-ters represent the struggles of the immigrant experience as well as the struggle to main-tain the mother-daughter bond across cultural and generational gaps. Tan wrote the book in remembrance of her own mother and experience as a second generation immigrant, assimilating into the mainstream, American world as a child, at the expense of her Chi-nese heritage. Ultimately, The Joy Luck Club is a story about reconciling the past and present, cultures, and generations.

Growing up as a second-generation Asian American, I had difficulty understand-ing and appreciating my parents’ struggles as immigrants to America. Having always en-joyed freedom, independence, and opportunity, I found it easy to overlook the hardships common to the immigrant experience my parents faced. The Joy Luck Club allows me to further understand the duality of the immigrant’s experience and to appreciate my Asian American identity.

From the developing cultural rift between children and their immigrant parents to dealing with racism in America, Tan’s themes resonate strongly with my upbringing. In 1994 my family decided to move to Taiwan. Identifying with my Western upbringing, I experienced culture shock, exacerbated by my own reluctance to embrace Chinese cul-ture. However, rather than favoring one culture over the other, I was gradually able to unite my major cultural influences to form my identity. Upon my return to Los Angeles, I had learned to speak Chinese fluently and to celebrate Chinese culture. More importantly, embracing my Chinese heritage helped me to value the close relationship I have with my whole family, a blessing that would not be possible had I remained stubbornly insistent on rejecting the unfamiliar.

Central to Tan’s work is the same dilemma: a cultural gap between the children and their parents that influences their relationships, for better or worse. The Joy Luck Club serves as a personal reminder never to allow anything overshadow one’s ancestral roots. This moving novel further showed me that my previous identity was incomplete. Through this book, it is my belief that perhaps there is no such thing as being completely Chinese, or completely American; we are all mixtures of our tastes, histories, habits, hopes, and memories.