The Joy Luck Club is a 1989 novel by Amy Tan.
The book centers around four mother-daughter pairs living in San Francisco. The mothers are Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair. The daughters are, respectively, Jing-Mei (June) Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. All of the mothers immigrated from China during their lives, and much of the book talks about their relationships with their mothers, with the exception of Suyuan Woo. The book is structured in sixteen chapters, each narrated in first person by one of the characters; the first four are told by the mothers, the next eight are told by the daughters, and the last four are told by the mothers, all with the exception of Suyuan Woo, who is dead at the beginning of the novel, so Jing-Mei takes her chapters. Most of each chapter is dedicated to a flashback of the narrator's childhood, usually regarding a particular incident or series of events involving that character's mother.
The novel was adapted into a 1993 film, executive produced by Oliver Stone and directed by Wayne Wang. It starred Ming-Na Wen, Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren Tom, and Rosalind Chao as the daughters, and Lisa Lu, Tsai Chin, Kieu Chinh, and France Nguyen as the mothers.
In 2020, the 1993 film adaptation got inducted into National Film Registry preservation list by the Library of Congress.
Film and book The Joy Luck Club provide examples of:
- The '80s: The novel's present-day set time is in the 1980s.
- Abusive Parents:
- Lena thinks she encounters an abusive mother in the apartment next to her as a child, but it turns out the mother and daughter are only playing.
- In Lindo's case, she has a forceful and abusive mother-in-law who puts a lot of pressure on her son and Lindo to conceive a child.
- Accidental Misnaming: Waverly's American fiancé is under the impression that her parents Lindo and Tin are called "Linda and Tim".
- Adaptation Distillation: The film kept most of the stories (with some changes), but trimmed some parts.
- Adaptation Expansion: Some parts were added to the film, such as Lena finding a new boyfriend after leaving Harold and Rose and Ted reconciling.
- Adaptation Personality Change:
- Ted in the film is depicted as redeemable, thus being attentive enough to save his marriage with Rose.
- Harold is a more blatant emotional abuser in the film, whereas the book counterpart is just casually selfish and unintentionally condescending.
- Adapted Out: Ying-ying's second son that was born without a brain, An-Mei's first younger brother, and most of An-Mei's children except for Rose are not included in the movie.
- All for Nothing: Suyuan is forced to abandon her twin baby girls by the side of the road so she could keep fleeing the Japanese. She wound up collapsing from exhaustion less than a mile down the road, and was rescued by a truck picking up refugees while passed out. For the rest of her life, she lamented that if she had just held onto them a little longer, they all could have been saved without being separated.
- Ambiguous Situation: In the book, the state of Lena's relationship with Harold is up in the air after her mother's advice to actively change her life. Also, while it hints that Rose will get the upper-hand in her divorce with Ted, her arc ends abstractly enough. The film avoids these by showing in the present day that Lena is with a new man she’s visibly happier with, and Ted, who was written as less of a jerk, was able to reconcile with Rose.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Lena goes through the motions of her marriage, splitting all the costs with her husband "equally" despite him making seven times what she does. When her mother asks why they do this, Lena tries to think of a way to explain it in a way for her mother to understand, only to give up and realize she doesn't know.
- Artistic License – Biology: In-Universe, Lindo's mother-in-law cannot understand why her son hasn't sired any children yet. He and Lindo are not physically intimate at all (he has not hit puberty) and he seems terrified at the idea, but lies to his mother and says he has lots of sex with her.
- Artistic License – Music: At the end of the section Two Kinds, she mentions playing two songs from Robert Schumann's Scenes from Childhood, Pleading Child and Perfectly Contented, thereafter realizing that the two songs are actually two halves of the same song. The two songs, actually known as Bittendes Kind and Glückes genug, are actually separate songs from the same book, Kinderszenen, only that they are beside each other. At least the German names were translated into the English names properly.
- Artistic License – Sports: The beginning of the movie shows a group of people gathered around for a football game featuring the Oakland Raiders, despite the present-day events taking place a month after Easter. Football season is over by the time Easter comes around.
- Babies Make Everything Better: Rose in the movie admits she got pregnant "for the worst reason", in order to keep Ted from straying. It doesn't work, though they both do love their daughter.
- Baby Factory: An-Mei's mother is intended to do nothing but have babies in her loveless second marriage. It's revealed that Second Wife arranged her rape so she could pass off the ensuing son as her own.
- Bait-and-Switch: Ying-Ying's first adult book entry hints that she was kidnapped and forcibly impregnated as a young girl since Lena's father claims that he saved her from "a fate too horrible to talk about" in China, and Ying-Ying absent-mindedly babbles to her young daughter that she fears she might get kidnapped and forced to have a baby by strange men. Her second entry disproves this: She willingly married a friend of her rich father's, but he turned out to be a crass philanderer who abandoned her a few months after their marriage, and she hated him so much that she aborted his child out of spite.
- Bait the Dog: When Second Wife is introduced, she sweetly greets An-Mei and gives her a "genuine" pearl necklace as a welcoming gift. Then An-Mei's mother exposes the necklace as fake to An-Mei, hinting at Second Wife's conniving and manipulative nature.
- Bald of Evil: Lena's husband Harold's baldness is a visual cue to his cold soullessness, along with the grey clothing and furniture. His replacement in the film version is notable for having thick, luscious hair, symbolic of his warmth and goodness.
- Batman Gambit: Lindo's plan for getting out of her first marriage. Having spent a long time observing her in-laws and watching over a maid that had become pregnant and then abandoned by her lover, Lindo tells her mother-in-law about a dream that a man with a mole (one of their ancestors) touched both her and her husband, causing their bodies to rot if they continued with their marriage, as well as planted the seeds of a child into a maid who was actually of royal blood. Lindo manages to not only successfully get out of her marriage with money to go to America while keeping her family's honor intact, but she helped the maid be able to go on to a better life for both her and her child.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Rose's husband Ted gets this twofold.
- It's implied he was drawn to her due to her submissiveness and his ability to push her around. After his first malpractice lawsuit, he got fed up with Rose's inability to make any decisions, without acknowledging that part of the reason she's such an Extreme Doormat is because of him.
- After endlessly browbeating Rose to make a decision while married, this comes back to bite him when she decides to reject Ted's pitiful divorce terms and fight to keep the house.
- Breather Episode: After the heartbreaking story of An-Mei's new family in "Magpies" and Ying-Ying's rather troubling young adulthood in "Waiting Between The Trees" and before Jing-mei's trip to China in "A Pair of Tickets," "Double Face" is a lighthearted and rather humorous tale detailing how Lindo and Tin met and overcame a language barrier to fall in love and get married so they could have a child and become citizens.
- Child by Rape: The film adaptation directly indicates An-Mei's half-brother is a product of rape.
- Culture Clash: When Waverly brings her American fiancé over for dinner, he horrifies her parents by unknowingly committing every Chinese culture faux pas during the meal. Protip: When a Chinese cook says the food they've made probably isn't very good, that means they actually think it's awesome. The film has him realize this and try to be more respectful of Chinese table manners.
- Darker and Edgier: Arguably, the fate of Ying-Ying's first baby in the movie. In the book, Ying-Ying gets an abortion. In the movie, Ying-Ying carries her son to term but drowns him months later while in a listless state.
- Death of a Child: Four-year-old Bing Hsu (drowned) and Ying-Ying's sons (the first one was aborted because it belonged to her awful first husband and the second one was born with a hole in its head and no brain).
- Defiled Forever: An-Mei's widowed mother is raped by a strange man and is then forced to become his concubine because she is considered defiled by her family and society. Even worse, the Second Wife spreads a rumor that the intercourse was consensual.
- Domestic Abuse:
- Ying-Ying's first husband ended up being a crass philanderer who abandoned her a few months after their marriage, and she hated him so much that she aborted his child out of spite.
- Lena's husband is of the financial variety.
- Ted grows into an emotional abuser to Rose.
- Driven to Suicide: Second Wife fakes suicide constantly to gain the favor of her superstitious husband.
- Establishing Character Moment: In the book, the first sign that Ted is a terrible person is when Rose tells him about his mother's racist statements and he's angrier at Rose for not standing up for herself than at his mother's attitude. Notably, due to his nicer and redeemable portrayal in the movie, he is present when said racism is directed at Rose and rightfully calls his mother out. In the end, he and Rose are eventually able to reconcile their marriage.
- Evil Matriarch: Huang Taitai in "The Red Candle" is pushy and demanding toward not only a young Lindo but her own son in an effort to gain a coveted grandson despite them being too young to have children, especially Tyan-Yu. Second Wife in "Magpies" makes her look like a saint in comparison with her manipulative behavior and bouts of pretend suicide to get what she wants and make sure no one else can get the benefits that she does. Both of them do get humbled in their own ways by the end of each story.
- Extreme Doormat: Tan makes it pretty clear just how terrible the consequences can be if a woman acts as such and the book is quite critical of a culture that encourages such.
- Financial Abuse: Lena's husband Harold does this to her. Despite making seven times her salary, he makes her split all the costs "50-50" and acts as if it's fair. He also gets rich off her ideas for his company without giving her payment or credit. It takes Lena's mother questioning why she has to pay for ice cream that she doesn't eat for her to realize this.
- Flashback: All the mother and daughter stories up to the present are told as flashbacks.
- Happily Adopted: Suyuan's twin daughters. The book even states the girls' adoptive mother tried to reunite them with Suyuan after the war.
- High-Powered Career Woman: Waverly is a shrewd tax attorney.
- Jade-Colored Glasses: As an adult, Waverly blames her mother Lindo for making her view her life this way. She laments that she realized her first husband's faults after her mother met him, and she always views her house, clothes, and life in a more negative light after her mother comments on them. It takes her finally confronting her mother to learn that Lindo never intended to make her feel bad about herself or her life — that it was Waverly projecting her insecurities onto her mother.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Rose's husband Ted is a bullying jerk in the book, though he does have a point that she is too much of an Extreme Doormat who should learn to make decisions for herself.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: This is more emphasized in the film version with Waverly. In the book, although she outgrows her petty rivalry with June in adulthood, she does compliment June for her writing work but tries to explain to her what didn't work out about it and unintentionally opens June's emotional wounds (due to this scene being told in June's point-of-view, Waverly is never aware of this). In the film version, the same scene happens, but the framing device shows that June and Waverly are on better terms and Waverly sincerely wishes June well in meeting her long-lost family.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Rose grows to realize that Ted is self-centered, often blames the brunt of his issues on her, and ultimately tries to kick her out of her house, expecting her to react well to the news of his cheating and asking for a divorce. In the film, they communicate and reconcile; in the book, they don't.
- Love Martyr: Rose believes that her submissiveness respects her husband Ted. Of course, she outgrows this mindset.
- Manipulative Bitch:
- Waverly spends most of her life thinking of her mother Lindo as a manipulator due to the latter telling her the story of how she tricked her way out of her awful first marriage in "Red Candle," and teaching her how to play chess. Waverly imagines her mother as this cunning, manipulative woman who deliberately makes passive-aggressive comments to try to shatter her confidence and ruin her life. It takes until near the end of the book for Waverly to realize that her mom never had any of the sinister motivations she imposed on her — she just has no filter.
- Second Wife in An-Mei's mother's story is manipulative in spades. She got First Wife addicted to opium to keep her docile and compliant, and she arranged Wu Tsing's marriage to Third Wife in the hopes of passing off their eventual son as her own, knowing the girl's poverty ensured she'd be too grateful to cross Second Wife and homeliness ensured Wu-Tsing would never favor her. When Third Wife also only had daughters, Second Wife befriended An-Mei's widowed mother to arrange her violent rape and marriage to Wu-Tsing to pass off the ensuing son as her own. On top of this, Second Wife constantly fakes being Driven to Suicide in order to scare Wu-Tsing into giving her her way all the time.
Harsher in Hindsight when you read Amy Tan's autobiographies and realize that this stuff all actually happened.
- Meaningful Name:
- Lindo does it with all three of her children. Her first child, a son, is named Winston because it sounds like "wins ton" and he helped get Lindo and Tin their citizenship (though he dies at 16 in a car accident). Her second son is named Vincent because it sounds like "win cent" and sons were considered quite prosperous. Waverly's full name is Waverly Place Jong after the street they were living on in San Francisco at the time to she is American born and give her a sense of belonging so she would never regret anything.
- Jing-Mei's name also has a deep meaning to it that her father explains to her the night before they're expected to meet her older sisters. "Jing" refers to something of good quality after washing away imperfections and "Mei" is short for "meimei," a term for "little sister" as a shout-out to her older sisters.
- Suyuan's name can translate to "long-cherished wish" which, in her case, was to see her daughters again and though she wasn't able to do so, Jing-Mei is able to fulfill that wish for her and see her sisters.
- My Death Is Just the Beginning: An-Mei's mother, trapped in a horrific marriage to her rapist, commits suicide by poison, but does so two days before the new year. Folklore states that the third day after death is when a spirit returns to settle old scores — and you do not want a spirit angry with you on New Year's Day. An-Mei's mother ensures her daughter and son will be cared for.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: Rose might have eventually gotten around to cashing Ted's $10k check and divorce papers had he asked nicely rather than show up in person to berate her for making him wait, angrily declaring that he's been cheating on her and wants her to move out so he and his new wife can move into the house. This pushes Rose to finally grow a spine (like he wanted), and she declares that she will fight him to keep the house and get a better divorce settlement.
- Odd Name Out:
- Rose's brothers are named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Bing.
- Lindo named her two sons in hopes of good fortune and luck in their lives (Vincent sounding like "win cent" and Winston being "wins ton") while Waverly she named after the street they lived on in San Francisco, as a way to have her daughter be considered wholly American.
- Parental Abandonment:
- Entirely unwillingly, on Suyuan's part; she leaves her twin daughters together under a tree to try and keep escaping the Japanese.
- An-Mei's mother, due to her circumstances. She takes An-Mei so she could live a better life in a wealthier household, ironically committing this again by abandoning An-Mei's younger brother. It's explained in the book that taking her son to a house where she serves as a concubine would rob him of a future since it would cut him off from his father's family, yet her son would never belong to or be treated well in the new one.
- Plot-Triggering Death: The death of Suyuan leads to June to discover that her half-sisters are still alive in China.
- Poor Communication Kills:
- Mr. St. Clair could never understand his wife fully because of poor communication, resulting in a marriage run mostly by tolerance than true love. Even Lena realizes that her father can merely "put words in her mother's mouth."
- This is played tragically in the case of Canning and Suyuan Woo just before her death. Suyuan discovered that her abandoned daughters were still alive after a friend found them shopping together and wrote her a letter about this, which reignites the hope that had faded away over decades. She tries to encourage Canning to go to China but neglects to mention the reason why she wants to go, and he refuses because he thought she just wanted to go on a vacation at the time and they were getting too old to be tourists in their 70s. Not long after this, she dies from an aneurysm, and only too late does Canning realize the meaning of the words when he receives a letter from his wife's daughters. He confesses to his aunt and Jing-Mei that it's one of the biggest regrets of his life.
- Pretty in Mink: Waverly's fiancé Rich gives her a mink coat.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: While the novel mentions Robert Schumann and his Kindersczenen as the piano piece that June was playing badly as a child, the film adaptation replaces it with "Humoresque Opus 101 No. 7" by Antonín Dvořák, which the child June messes up on at the piano.
- Rape as Drama:
- Alluded to with Tyan-Yu and Lindo in "The Red Candle." Huang Taitai enables and condones this because she wants an heir. However, nothing happens anyway. In the film, Tyan-Yu thrusts something at Lindo and makes her scream — but it's only his pet lizard! His mom is in Selective Obliviousness.
- Poor An-Mei's mother gets this in spades. Second Wife arranged her violent rape in order to trap her into concubinage. Being the degraded Fourth Wife of her rapist is one of the many things that drives her to suicide.
- "Rediscovering Roots" Trip: Jing-Mei/June goes to China after her mother's death. In experiencing life in China and telling her two half-sisters about their mother, she is finally able to make peace with her Chinese heritage and her tumultuous relationship with her mom.
- The Roaring '20s: The sequences with the mothers' childhoods are set in the 1920s. More evident in An-Mei's and Ying-Ying's stories, given how they were raised in wealthy families with some Western influence.
- Rounded Character: A specifically-praised aspect of the novel is that it was among the most prominent to portray Chinese-American women as such.
- Rule of Symbolism:
- Lena's and Harold's marriage is not-so-subtly symbolized by the bedside table he made in college: a huge slab of granite on spindly little legs that'll collapse under the slightest pressure. She finds it ugly and useless, yet he keeps it around because he likes it (much like the terms of their marriage), and she often has to tiptoe around it. Around the same time that her mother's Armor-Piercing Question makes Lena aware of how dysfunctional their marriage is, his pitiful table collapses in the guest bedroom Ying-Ying is staying in.
- Rose's and Ted's garden. Her inability to make any choices means he decides everything, including the house's carefully trimmed yard. After they separate, she lets the garden become overrun with weeds due to her indecision. When Ted comes over to browbeat her into signing the divorce papers so he can remarry and move his new wife in, he declares his intention to rip up the yard to put in something new. This helps Rose find the strength to tell him "No." She declares that she likes the wild look of the yard and will fight him to keep the house since she refuses to be a weed that he can just pluck up and throw out of his life.
- Sexless Marriage: Lindo's and Tyan-Yu's marriage, being he has no interest in her and he is downright terrified at the idea of consummating the marriage. Also, there's the fact that they're children when they're married.
- Shout-Out: At the talent show Jing-Mei plays at, one of her classmates sings, "I Enjoy Being a Girl".note
- So Beautiful, It's a Curse: An-Mei's mother, whose beauty attracted Wu-Tsing enough that Second Wife was able to convince him to rape and marry her against her will.
- Stage Mom: Suyuan and Lindo in regards to their daughters' piano playing and chess playing. Suyuan especially counts since the only reason Jing-Mei picked up the piano in the first place was that Suyuan was trying to force her into being a child star.
- There Are Two Kinds of People in the World: When Suyuan scolds little June for playing the piano badly, she tries telling the little girl that there are “Only two kinds of daughter: obedient or follow-own-mind. Only one kind of daughter could live in this house: obedient kind."
- Trauma Button: Lena cannot have ice cream ever since she binged an entire carton of the sweet and then threw it up during her anorexic phase.
- Weight Woe: Lena was anorexic as a teenager, starving herself to be skinner like her peers.
- "Well Done, Daughter!" Gal: Waverly and Jing-Mei feel this about their mothers, who constantly compared each of their daughters to the other's.