The Joy Luck Club
6/10. Okay la. Because the Crazy Rich Asians movie came out, and everyone kept on comparing it to The Joy Luck Club movie adaptation.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club tells the stories of four female first-generation Chinese-American immigrants and their four daughters through four parts of four chapters apiece. Harsh circumstances make up half the conflict, while intergenerational and intercultural differences dictate the rest. In the present, one of the mothers has died, and her daughter is trying to learn more about her mother and her culture. However, the chapters are episodic and mostly take place in the past, retelling the lives of the eight main characters. The Joy Luck Club is often prescribed as a staple in Asian-American literature, but I think that it isn’t as relevant today. It’s an important work to read in order to understand Asian-American experience in the late 20th century, but the connections to the contemporary Asian-American experience and identity are tenuous, and can be disastrous if read uncritically.
I hoped that The Joy Luck Club would be a less vapid version of Crazy Rich Asians, and something that offered insight into the Asian-American experience. But because I had that expectation, and the book takes itself seriously, I think it fails in that regard. Chinese culture is presented as horribly backwards: patriarchal, mystical, and underdeveloped. One of the mothers in the novel recalls watching her mother cut a piece of her flesh to be consumed as a part of Chinese medicine. Chinese women are presented as having been molded by that society, therefore timid and non-confrontational. Even the second generation of women are insecure and acquiescing towards their partners, despite being presented as ‘headstrong’. I felt anxious, even attacked at times when reading the novel, and understood that Western readers wholly took this as gospel. After all, it was written by a Chinese-American.
Despite this, I am disinclined to agree with Tan’s contemporaries who criticized the book as essentially racist, pandering to Western stereotypes and racists. I think there is no self-hatred or conscious prejudice against Chinese-Americans on Tan’s part when writing the novel. Skimming her Wikipedia biography reveals that after her father and brother passed away when she was a teenager, she had a tumultuous relationship with her only surviving family member in America, her mother, who often attempted suicide. The Joy Luck Club is based on her experiences with her mother, from whom she was estranged, and China, which she was born and raised outside of. Admittedly, her experience is narrow, but that doesn’t make it wrong. I would also add that my experiences are probably 40 years off Tan’s, so my lack of connection with the work might be a factor of a generation gap. Ironic.
However, I still think The Joy Luck Club was a mediocre novel. It was a character driven piece detailing what is supposed to be the Asian-American experience. Because I didn’t buy that, there wasn’t much left in it for me. Not plot at any rate. The writing had its quirks though, and little bits of truth that were redeeming. I liked the syntax that was used when the older generation was writing. It consisted of shorter, lurching sentences. The only time that there would be longer sentences would be for descriptions, normally involving metaphors. A similar syntax is used in Weike Wang’s Chemistry: A Novel, also about a Chinese-American woman navigating through a tumultuous period in her life, but there is only one voice in the novel, even choppier than the way the mothers spoke in The Joy Luck Club. Funnily enough, this is also quite reminiscent of Hemingway’s writing, which might have been what won her the 2018 Hemingway Award.
Another thing that I find striking is that the younger generations’ experiences are viewed from an American perspective. All their doubts, concerns, and insecurities are compared with Western standards, and judged against their Caucasian significant others as standards. In the first chapter, Jing-Mei dismisses her mother’s criticisms as “Chinese superstitions” instead of just superstition. Lena St. Clair refers to her “Chinese eyes”. Her mother’s signs of mental illness are dismissed as Chinese spiritualism. This isn’t a complaint more so than an observation. How could a novel written in English and published in America be any other way? The readers are American, not just Chinese, and even the Chinese-American readers would appreciate an explanation of the cultural norms to be able to better relate to them.
Less obvious, but more important, is how that perspective conveys the reality of the Asian-American experience, or any other experience of a minority. This is also a by-product of Tan’s own experience, an unintentional product of her perspective on America as a second-generation immigrant. As an outsider to a pervasive Western culture that is vastly different from that of a child’s home and parents, it is inevitable that Western culture becomes the reference point for any new experiences. Unless someone has immigrated to a new culture at a young age, the tensions caused by this are hard to explain. The home becomes foreign to the child. When parents are embarrassing, the child feels shame, then shame at having felt that shame. The child becomes disoriented when this reference point is changed. If The Joy Luck Club is read with this in mind, or after having experienced such confusion, the inner turmoil of this identity crisis is clear. In Kim Thúy’s novel, Vi, this is front and center of the problems the protagonist faces: integrating into Canadian society as a Vietnamese refugee. Her barriers are more prominently displayed and create the conflict in the story, and by doing so, conveys the reality of an immigrant experience more clearly.
Maybe I would have related more to the simple anecdotes, such as mothers comparing their children if I read it 30 years ago. Maybe the quirks in the writing would have been more interesting if I read The Joy Luck Club before reading other contemporary Asian-American literature. But America isn’t the America of The Joy Luck Club. Not all Chinese people live in Chinatowns. There are more Asian people, and the advent of internet has allowed for enclaves to form. Some things still ring true in this new Asian America. A character in the book states that “In a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family”, something that I cannot help agreeing with. In this new cacophony of voices however, I no longer blindly support any representation, afraid that it might disappear, concerned about how outgroups will perceive it. It’s now important that stories are told truthfully, and a certain diversity of experience is represented to avoid the problems arising from characterizing an entire community’s experience via one voice.
And of course, told with a copious helping of pictures of pretty Asian girls when the author can’t find any relevant pictures. Way to prove that Asian men aren’t sexist.
