|
|
What We're Reading
Amy Tan,
The Joy Luck Club
 Reviewed
by
Dr. Carl Robertson
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
I have been reading and rereading The
Joy Luck Club (and its Chinese translation Xifu
hui) this summer for several reasons, but the most
significant of them is genuine enjoyment. My previous reading of
The Joy Luck Club was probably done for
duty. As my purpose then was discovery of Chinese literature, especially
in what I saw as its classical phase of intense poetic description,
I missed the point. What I gained this summer from Amy Tan is frank
telling about relationships. This is what matters to me now, how
to relate our connections to others, how to make proper the manner
of our association with other beings like ourselves. But this wouldn’t
sell me on a story without the many hints of the love of words.
She is honest to the point of eloquence. Other writers manage a
kind of brash confessional with little grace, but Amy Tan has an
honesty that is usually clear, direct and precise in diction.
The Joy Luck Club is a collection of sixteen stories that
could stand on their own, telling the perspectives of eight women
who comprise four pairs of mother-daughter relationships. The mothers
are organized into a mahjong group named after a group that began
in Guilin during the height of what we call World War II. The nature
of the relationships can be seen as quite  similar—mothers
with strong personalities and the struggle their daughters go through
to achieve a kind of independence. I think this is what I saw in
my first reading however many years ago, and it is enough to dig
deeply into the book and the lives behind it. But there is more
to The Joy Luck Club.
What is more might be simply called a passage to healing, which
may only be another way of calling it a struggle for independence,
but what I see now is richer and more fulfilling. Instead of variations
on a theme of conflict-denouement-resolution I see a deep involvement
of a parent and her grown child, one that began long ago and will
continue into the future, partly because the process to healing
only begins in The Joy Luck Club, and
at various levels. Jing-mei, for example, who forms a leading role
as her mother passes away at the beginning of the story, takes us
to a start to healing. We only have Jing-mei’s remembrances
to tell the story of her mother, Suyuan, who founded the Joy Luck
Club. In Jing-mei we have the movement of mother to daughter and
daughter to mother as she represents both at once to each set of
constituencies, as it were, but also to the reader. It is her comments
that begin one great strand: “They [the mothers] are frightened.
In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful
of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see
daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese,
who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured
English. … They see daughters who will bear grandchildren
born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation”
(31). The mothers see the daughters in Jing-mei, but she also replaces
her mother at the mahjong table, a role she is assigned in order
to receive the commission to find her half-sisters in China. She
completes this, telling her mother’s tale at the opening and
closing of the novel, and in so doing acts as mother to recover
the lost daughters.
The structure of mother’s tales, tales of daughters-as-children,
of daughters-as-grownups, and finally of mothers whose tragedies
can heal the daughters fears is a nice feature. As with large Chinese
tales, the parts may seem a little fragmented to American readers,
but that is a little more accepted now and it is all pulled to the
center by the character of Jing-mei, who begins and ends, who stands
in for others (including readers and the author, however we take
her to be), and who indicates the patterns of recovery and healing.
Healing—incomplete, halting and tentative as it may be—is
dramatically shown in the relationship between Waverly Jong and
her mother Lindo Jong. For Waverly, life has been a contest, even
 with
her friend Jing-mei. A spirit of competition, of silent and determined
“invisible wind” drives her into a penetrating imagination
that wins numerous chess tournaments. But still her mother always
wins between them. She cannot defeat her mother’s invisible
strength. Finally, she finds her mother asleep and alone and weeps
in front of her, feeling controlled by her mother’s silent
critique of her fiancé. Her mother, waking, is shocked to
find what her daughter thought. At once Waverly feels free. “And
hiding in this place [her personal retreat from mother], behind
my invisible barriers, I knew what lay on the other side. Her side
attacks. Her secret weapons. Her uncanny ability to find my weakest
spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers
I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for
her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby
as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in”
(204).
Of course there are many other intriguing aspects of The
Joy Luck Club: the joy of language, including the
dynamic use of Chinese references in a naturalized English-language
setting, the dreamscape vision of the characters and even the plot,
the careful depiction of speech which is all the more remarkable
for giving the pidginesque spoken forms of the mothers and their
more polished interior dialogues while maintaining a consistency
of voice, the beliefs and practices of the characters just as they
are . . . and on. But much of that will have to await another telling.
I do believe The Joy Luck Club would improve
by the exclusion of a few details. As this is a personal essay I
may state that the two occasions when the name of deity is used
as an epithet are disappointing to me. I do not see this so much
a fault of Amy Tan’s as of a time and a society. I believe
there is a core of moral truth that runs through much of The
Joy Luck Club and Amy’s other writings which if it continued
and followed through to its natural consequences would clarify and
heal the other, but I recognize that mine is a small voice against
a pattern of practices.
An expert sea captain once wrote of Richard Henry Dana’s book,
Two Years Before the Mast, that the writing was so clear
and precise that he, the captain, could tell when Dana’s captain
was lost and waiting for the clouds to clear to get a good sighting
of the sun—though Dana himself had no idea.  Although
I can claim no expertise on anything relevant, Amy Tan writes so
precisely that we can find truths from within our own selves in
the characters she has so generously and freely offered to us.
*
Editor's note: Amy Tan will speak at Southwestern
University under the auspices of the library's Writer's Voice series
on October 23, 2007. More details on this event can be found on
the Writer's
Voice website.
What We're Reading features
reviews by members of the Southwestern University community. Some
reviews were previously published in the Library's annual Summer
Reading List.
Read
more reviews.
What We're Reading is a regular
feature of the A.
Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center.
|
