Amy Tan, a Chinese-American freelance writer, is known for her novel The Joy Luck Club, which is mainly based on her and her mother’s life experiences. She was born in 1952 in Oakland, California. However, after her brother and father dead in 1966, her family moved to Switzerland to start a new life. Then she returned to America for college, and finally obtained her doctor degree in linguistics at UC Berkeley. In 1987, when her mother was diagnosed with a severe illness, they came back to China and reunited with her half-sisters. Two years later, this novel was published and translated into 25 languages in the world. Besides this book, her other two novels The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) have also appeared
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Clair and Lena St. Clair, except that June tells her mother’s stories in her vision. The mothers recall their childhood and youth in China in the first section, and struggle to help their daughters’ marriages in the final section. The middle two sections are told by the four daughters about their childhood relationships with their mothers and troubles of their marriages. The four sections seem to have no connection with each other, but actually they are interwoven by the order of time, Sino-US cultural conflicts especially in education and marriage, mother-daughter relations, and people’s attitudes toward their fates. The title “the joy luck club” jumped into my eyes and inflamed my curiosity about its literal and symbolic meanings, which are embedded in stories of the eight characters. Jing-mei has been the wife of a Chinese military officer. When she lives in Guilin, China, she joins the “joy luck club” where she and other married women hold feast to comfort each other while Japanese armies are marching approach them. On the way to get together with her husband, she has no more strength to afford her two baby girls so she drops them on the side of the road and leaves alone. She is tortured by the guilt of abandoning her daughters and she passes away before she
Clair and Lena St. Clair, except that June tells her mother’s stories in her vision. The mothers recall their childhood and youth in China in the first section, and struggle to help their daughters’ marriages in the final section. The middle two sections are told by the four daughters about their childhood relationships with their mothers and troubles of their marriages. The four sections seem to have no connection with each other, but actually they are interwoven by the order of time, Sino-US cultural conflicts especially in education and marriage, mother-daughter relations, and people’s attitudes toward their fates. The title “the joy luck club” jumped into my eyes and inflamed my curiosity about its literal and symbolic meanings, which are embedded in stories of the eight characters. Jing-mei has been the wife of a Chinese military officer. When she lives in Guilin, China, she joins the “joy luck club” where she and other married women hold feast to comfort each other while Japanese armies are marching approach them. On the way to get together with her husband, she has no more strength to afford her two baby girls so she drops them on the side of the road and leaves alone. She is tortured by the guilt of abandoning her daughters and she passes away before she