30th Anniversary Edition of the Joy Luck Club
Sitting around the mahjong table, a popular Chinese game, four Chinese American women; Suyuan Woo, Lindo Young, Ying-Ying St. Clair, and An-Mei Hsu compete for the luck and joy that victory in this game known throughout East and Southeast Asia brings.
This story immerses us in the lives of four brave women born in China during turbulent times, with the outbreak of World War II and the Japanese invasion. The unwritten values and laws of a society different from the Western one, the expectations of these four women upon arriving in the United States, and the illusions and disillusions of the American dream manifest with the arrival of their four daughters with Anglicized names: June, Rose, Lena, and Waverly.
The experience of growing up in the United States, within the Chinese community of San Francisco, endows the girls with a complex identity: they are Americans who speak perfect English, none speak or read Mandarin fluently, they attend Baptist churches, and seek success in their professional fields. However, there is also something cultural that gives their identity an extra aspect that sets them apart from their peers in high school and college. It is the story of their mothers, the secrets left behind in China before migrating, the unspeakable pains they had to face, the arranged marriages they had to endure, the humiliations they inflicted upon their own mothers, and the children they had to leave behind to survive.
The book begins with the first round of games held after Suyuan Woo's death. Her daughter, Jing-Mei “June” Woo, replaces her mother supported by her three aunts. They tell young June about an unpaid debt that weighed on her mother during her lifetime and which she could never settle. It turns out that when escaping from the Japanese invasion, her mother, the wife of a Chiang Kai-shek official, died during the march towards safe territory, having to abandon her twin daughters.
Although June was aware of this story, the need to find her sisters and share the news of her mother's death becomes imperative for her and her father. Ultimately, June finds her sisters and learns their story. A pair of Muslim Chinese found them adorned with the jewelry their mother managed to leave them before departing. In the golden light of a photo, the true names of the girls were written.
The climax of the novel, which describes the reunion between June and her sisters, reflects the reconciliation with one’s own identity, the acceptance and understanding of being who one is thanks to those who came before us.
For young June, always worried about disappointing her mother, the embrace with her sisters becomes her greatest achievement.
In a world where refugees and migrants number in the tens of millions, The Joy Luck Club is an essential read to understand immigration through the lens of generations of women.
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