The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club is a book, which written by Amy Tan. It was written on 1989. Its story focuses on 8 chinnese woman, 4 mothers and 4 daughters. They live together but grow in different culture. This book has been translated in 35 languages. Amy Tan is an American writer who wrote about mother – daughter’s relationship. Her best selling book is The Joy Luck Club. Her book has been adapted into movie. The other works of Amy Tan are The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter and Saving Fish From Drowning. She also wrote a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. Tan also has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994).. The Joy Luck club actually inspired by her life, because she was left by her mother, because of her mother’s next marriage and left Amy and her other sisters. Overall , the Joy luck club is a novel which has multiculture on the setting, symbols and its story.
The Joy Luck Club has 8 main characters, they are mother : Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, Ying-Ying "Betty" St. Clair and 4 daughters : Jing-Mei "June" Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, Lena St. Clair. The novel opens after the death of Suyuan Woo, an elderly Chinese woman and the founding member of the Joy Luck Club. Suyuan has died without fulfilling her "long-cherished wish": to be reunited with her twin daughters who were lost in China. Suyuan’s American-born daughter, Jing-mei (June) Woo, is asked to replace her mother at the Joy Luck Club’s meetings.At the first meeting, Jing-mei learns that her long-lost half-sisters have been found alive and well in China. The other three elderly members of the Club – her mother’s best friends and Jing-mei’s "aunties" – give Jing-mei enough money to travel to China and meet her sisters. Essentially, Jing-mei has the opportunity to fulfill her mother’s greatest wish. Jing-mei’s aunties assign her the task of telling her twin sisters about the mother they never knew. The only problem is, Jing-mei feels like she never really knew her own mother.This simple premise allows the book to cast a much wider net, as it raises the question of how well daughters know their mothers. The other three members of the Joy Luck Club – Ying-ying, Lindo, and An-mei – all have wisdom that they wish to impart to their independent, American daughters. However, their daughters – Lena, Waverly, and Rose – all have their own perspectives on life as Americans.
This gives the book a total of eight perspectives and life stories to draw from. The novel is comprised of sixteen chapters, with each woman (with the exception of Suyuan) getting two chapters with which to tell her story.At the end of the book, Jing-mei flies to China to meet her half sisters. She is extremely apprehensive about meeting them. When the sisters do meet for the first time, they instantly hug and cry. Jing-mei’s mother’s wish has been fulfilled, and through the process, Jing-mei feels that she has come closer to her mother.
The setting of this book takes place in several places, such as in The "present day" of the book takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a trip at the end to Guangzhou and Shanghai, China. The year is roughly somewhere in the 1980’s. The daughters’ youth therefore takes place somewhere in the 1950’s in San Francisco. The mothers, however, engage in a series of flashbacks that take place all over China: Wushi, Kweilin, Tai Lake, etc. Their flashbacks also take place across a number of years, probably ranging from 1920 to around 1940.
The Joy Luck Club has many symbols in it, the symbols is representation of chinnese culture: The Swan and the Swan Feather, the swan feather synbolize about the high expectation a mother to her daughter, we use to call it duck- but swan is better that duck, so it tells us that every mother has best hope for her daughter. Next, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, In the novel, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates is a Chinese book detailing all of the dangers that could befall a child. So the book symbolizes a mother’s desire to protect her children against any and all dangers they face. The mother in the parable starting off Part II is worried that her daughter will fall while bike riding. And then, Food, The women of the Joy Luck Club feast every week in order to forget their sorrow. Waverly describes cooking as "how my mother expressed her love, her pride, her power, her proof that she knew more than Auntie Su." Similarly, Jing-mei says that Chinese mothers show their love "not through hugs and kisses but with stern offerings of steamed dumplings, duck’s gizzards, and crab." Basic takeaway here? Food = love. Food = hope. Food = happiness.
The symbols are actually including in China, but remember that they live in America, so this is show the real multiculture which exist on their life.
In the story, the author Amy Tan build the dynamic relationship between Chinese mothers and second-generation Chinese-American daughters. She also telling how multiculturalism has contribution in the strain of relationship between people who have different beliefs, values, and viewpoints in life. But overall, The Joy Luck Club shows us that different cultures in our life, can be a thing that complete our life, in condition that we can understand each other and not egoist (it is told in the story among the mothers and daughters). The Joy Luck Club is a recommended book for us who live in difference. So we can stay in difference with diversity.