Unfolding Bonds: Analyzing Culture Through The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989, centers around love, family, and respect, while overcoming social inequalities. Tan is able to both fill hearts with joy for the good fortune and sorrow for the bad luck of eight Chinese women. Meeting together to play mah jong, raise money, and share stories, the idea of the joy luck club is created by Suyanne Woo, the late mother of June Woo. June is asked to fill her mother’s place at the fourth corner of the mah jong table, and listen to the secrets of her mother’s long forgotten life in China. As the stories unfold new symbols are discovered and new lessons are learned. The Joy Luck Club has opened new doors and inspired many with substantial influences in the areas of cuisine, art, and popular

Food’s role is pivotal in The Joy Luck Club, every mother has a broad repertoire of traditional dishes, and every family gathering has plenty of delicious cookery. In Joelen Tan’s case, the mouth-watering recipes have inspired her “Read, Watch & Eat event”, at which she and her “friends shared Chinese-inspired dishes”(J. Tan). Among those noted and recreated are “Bok Choy & Water Chestnuts”, “Shrimp Stir Fry & noodles”, and “Chinese Dim Sum”(J. Tan). Within the novel, as June Woo examines the delightful spread brought together by the mothers of the Joy Luck Club, she points out the “chaswei”, which is a “sweet barbecued pork cut into coin-sized slices”, and also “a whole assortment of what [she] always call[s] finger goodies”, such as “skinned pastries filled with chopped pork, beef, shrimp, and unknown stuffings that [her] mother used to describe as ‘nutritious things”(A. Tan 31-32). The excitement over these dished shows the importance they hold in June’s, remembrances. Moreover, besides simply recreating the recipes, Bryton Taylor participates in the cultural aspects of the novel. She is fascinated at how humans “can adapt cultures in the form of small traditions or holidays, into [their] own, even if [they] haven’t lived in the countries”(Taylor). She and her family have “been celebrating Chinese New Year” for a long while, even though they

For the most part, the novel exposes the westernized society to a society much different in its foundation and customs. In San Francisco, “[s]everal African American and Asian American women writers” were recognized for “creat[ing] important novels that explor[e] aspects of the modern black and Asian experience”(Seidel). Those included were “Toni Cade Bambara in The Salt Eaters (1980), Bette Bao Lord in Spring Moon (1981), Alice Walker in The Color Purple (1982), Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987), and Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club (1989)”(Seidel). The book shined a light on a lifestyle often overlooked or stereotyped. It is a story about not only about embracing womanhood, but also about experiencing this embrace from another society. According to Michael Dorris, The Joy Luck Club shows “[e]lements of Chinese-American culture that often have been distorted or ignorantly stereotyped” but are “here illuminated, burnished, made fresh”(Dorris). Throughout the short stories within the novel, every single women faces the reality of being treated as a minority. For example, while Ying-Ying St. Clair visits her daughter Lena and Lena’s husband, Harold, he treats his wife’s mother very casually, which Lena knows is not how her Chinese-born mother aspires to be handled. Harold is going down to the store to pick up steaks for dinner, but