response: the joy luck club

The Joy Luck Club collected dust on my shelf for almost a year, but during a wave of hunger for Chinese culture (that has stricken consistently since Shan Sa's Empress), I finally cracked the spine of Amy Tan's 1989 novel. (Penguin Books Ltd, 288 pages)

"I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter." Ying-Ying St. Clair, 252

The novel is divided into vignettes, each dedicated to one of eight women - four first-generation Chinese-Americans and their four immigrant Chinese mothers. Opening from the perspective of Jing-Mei Woo just after her mother's death, Tan introduces to the reader the old Chinese women who alternate between Chinese and poor English, wear mismatched clothes and impart superstitious advice, introducing the women through the narrative critical eyes of the typical westerner (such as their prevalently American daughters).

Yet the narrative interweaves throughout the unfolding stories of their youths in China, from exotic adventures of wealth to arranged marriages escaped through clever deceit, and these tiny Chinese women - their complexity formerly veneered by their awkward foreign customs - are revealed as women of regal strengths and arcane depths.

The theme remains wonderfully complex as their daughters are also portrayed with grace and sympathy. Exasperated by their mothers' superstitions and displaced values that are contentious with the American society in which they're expected to succeed, they also earn our empathy as Tan leads us through the unique circumstances of their lives.

In the final chapter, Jing-Mei Woo treks to China with her father, and we see her gaze in astonishment out of a train's window as they ride through the countryside. Looking across to her father who's joyful homecoming tears contrast to her wide-eyed wonder, there's a poetic beauty in both sentiments of parent and child.

The disconnect-yet-enduring-bond between mother and daughter transcends cultural themes. We perceive that as Woo unlocks the beautiful dimensions of her mother that had been distanced farther than the width of the Pacific, so do those dimensions unlock in her own spirit, eclipsing contexts and expectations.