Each of the women faces difficult choices when it comes to marrying-whether it be Lindo Jong being forced into an early union with a man she loathes, Ying-Ying St. Discuss the topic of marriage as it is represented in The Joy Luck Club. How does this exchange set the stage for the stories that follow? To what extent do you think that Jing-mei is right? How well do any of the mothers and daughters know each other in this book?ģ. Jing-mei thinks that the reason this upsets the aunties is that it makes them fear that they may not know their own daughters either. “What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything. They are taken aback when Jing-mei responds. When Jing-mei’s aunties tell her about her sisters, they insist that she travel to China to see them, to tell them about their mother. Which of the eight main characters did you identify with the most? Why?Ģ. They struggle with raising their children, contend with unhappy marriages, cope with difficult financial circumstances, and are disheartened by bad luck. Although the women in The Joy Luck Club are Chinese or Chinese American, and their heritage plays an important part in their lives, they also have experiences that all of us face, regardless of culture, even today. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.1. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters.

Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories.

The joy luck club book pages