Plot Overview
The Joy Luck Club contains
sixteen interwoven stories about conflicts between Chinese immigrant
mothers and their American-raised daughters. The book hinges on Jing-mei's
trip to China to meet her half-sisters, twins Chwun Yu and Chwun
Hwa. The half-sisters remained behind in China because
Jing-mei's mother, Suyuan, was forced to leave them on the roadside
during her desperate flight from Japan's invasion of Kweilin during
World War II. Jing-mei was born to a different father years later,
in America. Suyuan intended to return to China for her other daughters,
but failed to find them before her death.
Jing-mei has taken her mother's place playing mahjong
in a weekly gathering her mother had organized in China and revived
in San Francisco: the Joy Luck Club. The club's other members—Lindo,
Ying-ying, and An-mei—are three of her mother's oldest friends and
fellow immigrants. They tell Jing-mei that just before Suyuan died,
she had finally succeeded in locating the address of her lost daughters.
The three women repeatedly urge Jing-mei to travel to China and
tell her sisters about their mother's life. But Jing-mei wonders
whether she is capable of telling her mother's story, and the three
older women fear that Jing-mei's doubts may be justified. They fear
that their own daughters, like Jing-mei, may not know or appreciate
the stories of their mothers' lives.
The novel is composed of four sections, each of which
contains four separate narratives. In the first four stories of
the book, the mothers, speaking in turn, recall with astonishing
clarity their relationships with their own mothers, and they worry
that their daughters' recollections of them will never possess the
same intensity. In the second section, these daughters—Waverly,
Jing-mei, Lena, and Rose—relate their recollections of their childhood
relationships with their mothers; the great lucidity and force with
which they tell their stories proves their mothers' fears at least
partially unfounded. In the third group of stories, the four daughters
narrate their adult dilemmas—troubles in marriage and with their
careers. Although they believe that their mothers' antiquated ideas
do not pertain to their own very American lifestyles, their search
for solutions inevitably brings them back to their relationships
with the older generation. In the final group of stories, the mothers
struggle to offer solutions and support to their daughters, in the
process learning more about themselves. Lindo recognizes through
her daughter Waverly that she has been irrevocably changed by American
culture. Ying-ying realizes that Lena has unwittingly followed her
passive example in her marriage to Harold Livotny. An-mei realizes that
Rose has not completely understood the lessons she intended to teach
her about faith and hope.
Although Jing-mei fears that she cannot adequately portray
her mother's life, Suyuan's story permeates the novel via Jing-mei's voice:
she speaks for Suyuan in the first and fourth sections, the two “mothers'
sections,” of the novel. Suyuan's story is representative of the
struggle to maintain the mother-daughter bond across cultural and
generational gaps; by telling this story as her mother's daughter, Jing-mei
enacts and cements the very bond that is the subject of Suyuan's
story. When Jing-mei finally travels to China and helps her half-sisters
to know a mother they cannot remember, she forges two other mother-daughter
bonds as well. Her journey represents a reconciliation between Suyuan's
two lives, between two cultures, and between mother and daughter.
This enables Jing-mei to bring closure and resolution to her mother's
story, but also to her own. In addition, the journey brings hope
to the other members of the Joy Luck Club that they too can reconcile
the oppositions in their lives between
past and present, between cultures, and between generations.
