By Amy Tan
4 Chinese American women comprise of the Joy Luck Club, each of them with painful memories of their past in China. The Club was started by Suyuan Woo, and she plays mahjong every week with her friends An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair. Each woman has a daughter and the daughters have a difficult time understanding things that their mother does.
First, Suyuan and her daughter Jing-mei's story. Suyuan had to flee her home in China during the war with the Japanese. She couldn't carry her two babies and left them on the road with her babies, praying that someone would find and take care of them. For years, she searched with her second husband, Jing-mei's father (her first husband, a military officer, was killed in the war). She couldn't find them and eventually came to the US. Soon after her death, the rest of the Joy Luck Club receives news that they were found by a mountain-dwelling couple long ago. They couldn't read the Chinese that was on the back of a card left with the babies, so she only figured out who they were recently. Even then, she couldn't find the family because the house had been bombed and replaced by a factory. By chance, an old friend of Suyuan found the sisters, now grown women, and told them of their mother. Jing-mei doesn't understand much of this, and only remembers a mother who tried so hard to make her a prodigy, like her friend Waverly. Finally, she can't take it and tells her she wishes she was dead, which the two supposed the abandoned girls were. But as she learns what happened, Jing-mei comes to an understanding. In the final chapter of the book, Jing-mei has a tearful reunion with them and the rest of her Chinese family.
Lindo Jong was forced into an arranged marriage with a spoiled husband and a harsh mother-in-law. By her own wit, she escaped and made it to the US, where her daughter Waverly was born. As a child, Waverly was a chess prodigy, but she somehow lost her skill after a spat with her mother. Later on, Waverly constantly feels as if her mother's judgment controls her actions, but later comes to terms with it after a divorce and learning that her mother's criticism was just taken the wrong way.
An-mei's mother was widowed, then raped by a rich man and forced to become his concubine. An-mei watched her mother suicide from an opium overdose, then came to America and had many children. Her daughter was married to Ted, and after her divorce, she is devastated. After getting over it, she learns to create her own identity instead of hiding in Ted's shadow.
Ying-ying St. Clair grew up in a rich family and married a man she thought she loved. But after she became pregnant with his son, he began cheating on her, so she aborted and left. She lived in poverty for years, working as a salesgirl, when she catches the eye of an American, Clifford St. Clair, and marries him. She left behind her spirit, but she finds it again to help her daughter, Lena. Lena is married to an architect, who she works for in a company she helped him make. He insists on splitting all their expenses equally while he makes much more money than her. She eventually divorces him and starts to make her own decisions.
Note: This was really hard for me because the book was sectioned with the story going back and forth between EIGHT different people.
