The Joy Luck Club
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The story of June and her mother was the only one to have any emotional impact, the rest were banal. There was nothing here that I hadn't read or seen before and I can't say that I feel enlightened about Chinese culture. This is just wallowing for readers who want to feel that their relationship with their mother is the root of all their problems. Maybe it's because I'm a man, but somehow I don't think that's the reason this shallow book didn't win me over.
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Wonderful
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The Joy Luck Club follows the lives of a group of Chinese women and daughters living in modern day San Francisco. Not unlike "How to Make an American Quilt" (not sure which came first) the book examines the difficult maternal relationships using flashbacks to various parts of the mother's lives. It is only once you know someone's history that you can understand why a person behaves the way they do. I love this book. Reading it was one of those rare joys that made me forget who and where I was as I read it. I even managed to read throughout the entire night before noticing that the sun had come up. I had forgotten to go to bed! Beautifully drawn characters, elaborate but not complicated plots, and hauntingly evocative of descriptions of life for women in early 20th century China. The Chinese aspect of the story dominates but women from all cultures will recognise the universal relationships between mothers and daughters. It has even given me a new appreciate for Chinese food! Don't wait for a rainy day - read it now. Sisterhood is global.
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The need to belong and the desire to escape
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Focussing on a female dominated mother-daughter generation gap and a Chinese-American culture difference Tan mixes social and personality differences to create a broad and encompassing novel about change. TJLC shows, in its older generation, the huge amounts of reliance displaced individuals have on bonding with other alienated people and the human struggle surmounted to achieve happiness. The daughters in TJLC portray the difficulties sometimes endured being Chinese-American and seeming to be an outsider of each culture. So through these two different aspects of the novel Tan incorporates a “traditional” Chinese story at times in the vein of a less political Wild Swans and the cultural disparity of the modern world adds weight to the “emigrant” literature already established from writers such as Frank McCourt (Irish immigration to the USA) and Caryl Phillips (West Indian immigration to Britain).
Sometimes the tone of TJLC can be overly sentimental and meandering but in all Tan creates a moving tale of displacement, the need to belong and solidarity.
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Moving, enlightening and a joy to read.
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Addressing the differences between cultures and several generations, Amy Tan's novel is an enlightening, involving and thoroughly enjoyable work. The characters are beautifully portrayed, while the fragmented nature of the chapters poignantly demonstrates the sheer variety of differing lifestyles, beliefs and opinions. This book left me with a lump in my throat, desperate for more. I thoroughly recommend this novel to anyone, and I shall certainly be reading more of Amy Tan's work in the future.
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A beautiful set of tales...but little thread running through
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Amy Tan continues to enchant her readers with wondrous but tragic tales of life, loves and disappointments. Having read two of her other works her style is familiar and her ability to tell a story placing layer upon layer of conflicting and often confusing emotions together yet do it with such deft ease and understanding is so enjoyable. There is so much of family relationships of high expectations and perhaps too easy resulting disappointments or at least the character's perception of them. Perhaps though she should try to write something a bit less cynical, less steeped in sorrow and hardship and something with more hope for the future rather than the all too familiar bitter-sweet ending. It does lay life bare in many ways though the hardships gone through in the past (mother's generation) may only have been typical of a certain time and place and the hardships of the present are really mostly of the daughter's own making i.e. they seem not to look for great love merelt something convenient and then end up discarding their modern marriages as easily as they came by them. It does, though, show the value of a strong set of beliefs and traditions by which to live as, although they may seem outdated to the modern generation as in the stories of the daughters who felt more settled with modern (cynical and mistrusting) America than with ancient Chinese customs, the value of believing in something becomes more and more apparent as the younger generation is seen to be part of the throwaway society assigning little value or effort to making things count which is strongly contrasted to the older generation of Chinese born mothers who know what they believe and try to teach their daughters the importance of faith and hope before it is too late. One thing though, it would be easier to follow these separate and basically unrelated tales if each family's tale were told separately so as not to confuse the reader by switching back and forth and back and forth as she does chapter after chapter. Beautiful little tales of pride, hope and tragedy but the characters still seem to lack any confidence in themselves - the older generation still trying to convince themselves to cling onto what little hope they feel they have left (often lived out through their own children) yet the younger generation themselves seeming to not only resent this intrusion into their lives (wishing merely to be left alone in order to just be themselves) yet at the same time giving a sense that they are completely 'lost', neither understanding that love and marriage should mean the same thing nor seeming to really know exactly who or what they really are. Perhaps that's the crux of all of her books, a sense of identity crisis in first generation immigrants.......
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