A review by yegua_blanca
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

3.0

Revisiting this book that I read for high school sophomore English class. I remember being deeply moved the first time I read it, and I still found myself invested in the relationships between each mother and daughter. There is something so fundamental at the core of Tan’s straightforward writing here that is human and moving. However, the many narrators/narratives of this book (4 daughters, 3 mothers) can sometimes blend together into a general tale of the immigrant experience, which I find particularly disappointing because so often the stories of immigrants are already dismissed or homogenized. I feel some more attention to the characters, particularly differentiating the mothers from each other, would have been needed. And now that I read this being a bit older, I saw some more dated cultural aspects that I hadn’t recognized before. The fact that the Chinese-American daughters only end up with white men. Humor that sometimes relies on the reader identifying with an American perspective and laughing at the “superstitions/quirks” of the Chinese mothers. Some tired East/West binaries that go unchallenged. Still, I really appreciated that Tan did take the time to probe the mothers’ experiences, especially the chapters about their lives as older women, since I find that these perspectives are so rarely discussed in media. This book is a beautiful exploration of the love and loss passed down from mothers to their daughters.