61 pages • 2 hours read
Amy TanThe Joy Luck Club
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Alternating Stories
The alternating first-person point-of-view motif used throughout the novel is a literary device that allows the author to create a richer narrative and sequence revelations. In many instances, the same event is described from both sides of the mother/daughter, demonstrating that their perspectives matter greatly to their description of what transpires. For example, the reader sees Ying-ying through the filter of Lena’s eyes, which view her as bewildering and possibly mentally ill. In Ying-ying’s later explanation of the trauma she experienced that led her to alter her persona, the reader comes to understand why she behaves as she did.
The structure of the novel, with its four mother and four daughter characters, with four stories in each of the four sections, creates an interrelated construction that symbolizes “balance,” a requirement mentioned frequently by the mothers. Moreover, combining stories from both the past and present weaves together a sense of who the characters are and what they wish for, highlighting both unfulfilled hopes and actualized understanding. Conflicts are introduced from both mother and daughter perspectives and resolutions move toward a climax in each pairing. Each mother/daughter narrative stands alone, but is also part of the overall chronicle as the lives of the mothers, and their families, are inexorably interconnected.
Joy Luck
The name of the Joy Luck Club symbolizes the members’ hopes for a better life for themselves and their children in America. Suyuan devised the name while still in China during the Japanese invasion, at a time when everyone around her was consumed by fear and deprivation. She looked for a way to help her friends concentrate their minds on looking forward to an improved future. The hope of being lucky and winning the meager prizes at the club became their only joy in life. Suyuan recounted to Jing-Mei the story of how she founded the Joy Luck Club in order to impart the lesson of how she overcame hardship.
This sentiment was carried on in America, where barriers of language, lower social standing, and financial struggle caused hardship. Suyuan sought to build community with those who shared her way of thinking and understood her past adversities. The club’s members sometimes bicker, but they also find joy in companionship and luck in helping each other. The club itself symbolizes the women’s inner strength and their dreams of a prosperous future for their children.
Mahjong
One of the activities at every meeting of the Joy Luck Club is playing mahjong. This is a connection to the members’ old lives in China and symbolizes their feelings of the superiority of Chinese culture. When Jing-Mei comments that she played mahjong in college with some Jewish friends, Lindo dismissively comments that no one else plays mahjong as well as the Chinese.
With its four seats, the mahjong table also represents the four women and their lives. Suyuan had sat in the “east wind” seat, so Jing-Mei takes her place there. This represents Jing-Mei taking over her mother’s story and the quest for her daughters in China. A mahjong game always begins with the east wind player and ends when one player wins with a complete hand. The novel begins with Jing-Mei dealing with her unresolved feelings about her mother and ends when she fulfills her mother’s dream of being reunited with her lost children. The three daughters of Suyuan become “a complete hand.”
Mahjong also symbolizes the internal strength of mothers, who go through life secretly planning and strategizing, to “win” by making the lives of their families more successful.
Suyuan’s Wish
Suyuan’s wish to be reunited with her daughters symbolizes the wish of the other mothers in the story to connect with their daughters. Separated by so many differences, these Chinese mothers often feel as if they have lost their daughters, as Suyuan lost her baby girls. For their part, the daughters in the book feel emotionally estranged from their mothers. By the end of the novel, the mother/daughter pairs come to a greater understanding of each other. When Jing-Mei finally meets her sisters, she realizes that she had overanalyzed the question of her Chinese heritage. The answer to what part of her is Chinese is, simply, her family. This is also the fulfillment of Suyuan’s wish, that her American-born daughter would understand the importance of her family history and through that understanding, understand Suyuan as well.
Gifts
Giving gifts is a recurrent motif in the story. There are many examples of gifts that mothers give or hope to give to their daughters, which symbolize their love and all the emotions that they cannot express verbally. The swan in the opening fable symbolizes the hope of the mother for her daughter’s boundless future. There are many instances in which the mothers in the story give their daughters jewelry. For example, Lindo gives Waverly her red jade chang, a carved tablet, before her first tournament, and An-Mei’s mother gives her a sapphire ring, to show her that she has value.
The most significant example of gift-giving is when Suyuan gives Jing-Mei her jade pendant. Jing-Mei fails to see its significance at first, thinking it is a consolation prize for having been humiliated by Waverly. Jing-Mei doesn’t wear the pendant, since it is too ornate and “Chinese,” symbolic of the cultural differences between herself and her mother. After Suyuan dies, Jing-Mei wears the pendant in the hope that, as her mother told her, she will absorb understanding of who her mother was through the contact with her skin. Jing-Mei realizes that the pendant embodies the love and heritage her mother wanted to pass on to her, that she was unable to express in words.
Food as CultureFood as Culture
Familiar foods are one element of Chinese heritage that the daughters openly embrace and they associate the dishes their mothers made with childhood happiness. Waverly says at one point that her mother shows her love and pride through cooking. Taking great care with meal preparation is a way for the mothers to demonstrate love for their children without words, which are prone to language barriers and misunderstanding.
Food is a link between generations, both for the mothers and daughters in the novel and the generations that came before them. The mothers, in their remembrances of their lives in China, fill their stories with descriptions of food, showing how important food is to their memories. The things they ate as children in China, that they cannot get now, symbolize what was lost to them culturally when they moved to America.
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