Book Review of The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club is a novel which written by Amy Tan. It was published in 1989. Amy Tan was born in the US to immigrant parents from China. She has been received various awards. Joy Luck Club is her best work, it has been translated into 35 languages. This work also inspired by by Tan’s history of life. Her mother was forced to move to America because of her marriage with American. The relationship between mothers – daughters and multiculture are the soul of this story.
The title of this The Joy Luck Club it self, taken from name a club, where Chinesse played mahjong ( chinesse traditional games). This club is in America. There are 4 mothers (Suyuan woo, An – mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, Ying Ying St. Clair ) and 4 daughters( Jing – mei woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair ) in this book. Actually, each chapter of this book was written by different writer. But they have same orientation. The mothers came from China, they moved to America and hoped that their daughters would get better life there. The mothers came from China and they had grown in Chinese culture. The daughters came from chinese descendant but they grew up with American culture. On the other hand, American culture has very big differences with Chinese culture. For example, Americans are so individualist while Chinese are co communal, then Chinese do believed with superstitious, while Americans believe that everything based on logic and could be explained scientifically. Most of Americans think democratically, while most of Chinese was of thinking are structured by their ancestors.
Those differences appear in this story as a conflict. Of course, the conflict happened between mother and daughter, because this book focused on the relationship between them. For example,the daughters who were expected to be quite and ‘dark’ not expressing their own opinions ( chinese culture ) but they grew up in a society that pushed them to be brave and democratic ( American culture ).
Mothers wanted daughters to understand the importance of her chinesse identity but at the same time she wanted he daughter to be American privilege, this thing became a very big job for the daughters and made a conflict on them self.
The multiculture in this book creates tension between the generations, because neither can understand the other completely. Although there are so many problems and tension in this book, the author still give emphasize of mother and daughter relationship. They can’t be separated above the problems, because mothers and daughters need one another to find the light on their life.