Okay, so here's the thing: this book is bitter. And I'm having a hard time figuring out how to start this recap. So head out to left field with me and we'll see if we can't circle around to it.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is on all those must-read lists I like so much. But the first time I remember really cataloguing this title away in my brain library was a few years ago when a girl I knew in college started blogging about books. She listed this in her Top 5 Favorite Fictional Books EVER, and when I read that, I mentally filed it away as one to look out for. About a year after her post, Cody and I made our maiden voyage into The Book Shelter and this book came home in our stack.
Fast forward about three and a half years and now I'm in a book club with some of my best friends. When they visited me up in NC last summer, this book on my shelf by AMY Tan caught my friend AMY's eye. While we were out and about downtown, she picked it up at a thrift store for like a quarter, and subsequently chose it as her next selection for our book club.
So last September found me reading this collection of sixteen essays or short stories about four Chinese women, their American-born daughters, and the complicated relationships they all have with each other. The Joy Luck Club published in 1989 is the debut novel of Amy Tan, herself the American-born daughter of her Chinese immigrant mother, and it is the work she is still best known for despite having written five additional novels, a couple of children's books, and some non-fiction into the mix as well. In The Joy Luck Club, we are first introduced to Jing-Mei "June" Woo whose mother has recently passed away. Jing-Mei has been asked by her father to fill in her mother's spot at the Joy Luck Club, a group of Chinese women founded by Jing-Mei's mother in 1949 who get together to play mahjong.
This book was a hard one for me. I thought the structure was really interesting, and I found the interlocking stories and shifting perspectives intriguing as well as challenging. I did a LOT of flipping back and forth to make sure I was connecting the right daughter with the right mother. The book is divided into four section, and each section has four stories. The first and last sections are the mothers' stories, the middle sections are the daughters' stories. I found the language really beautiful and thought the book was exceptionally well written. The imagery is very rich, and I definitely felt exposed to a lot of aspects of Chinese culture as I read it (though Tan has been criticized from some for her depiction of Chinese culture). I could probably read this book a hundred times and still not fully appreciate all the symbolism Tan employs to tell each woman's story.
But is this a book I would want to read one hundred times? I don't think so. As I said to start this recap, the word that comes to mind when I think of The Joy Luck Club is "bitter". I found it so harsh, and the fractured relationships between these mothers and daughters left me heartsick. While there was some attempt at communication and relationship-building between some of our characters, we have to wade through a lot of miserable life circumstances and the consequences of years of poor choices to get to even a glimmer of hope. Just as these stories are interconnected while being distinct, so these mothers, while connected to their daughters, seem to be cut off from them. It was really hard to read even while being really beautiful. While this is a book I might see myself revisiting at some point in the future, it is by no means one I would turn to again and again. While The Joy Luck Club undoubtedly is the type of book that lends itself to re-reading for a better grasp at understanding it, it would be hard for me to knowingly subject myself to that kind of trauma again. It's a book I would recommend, but wouldn't recommend.
How's that for a recap? Have you read The Joy Luck Club or any of Tan's other work? Have you ever read a book that was traumatic while still somehow retaining beauty?
