The Blurb
“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. United in loss and new hope for their daughters’ futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. 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.”
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, was first published in 1989, my copy of the book is the 30th year anniversary edition which includes a preface by the author. In this, Tan explains the series of events that led to her writing her debut novel the The Joy Luck Club. In this preface she writes about her own mother, who was also a storyteller, and about how for many years she hated hearing her mothers stories, stories of her life back in China, of her own mother, stories full of superstition and more often than not contradiction. Amy didn’t appreciate these stories until she was faced with the prospect of never hearing them again.
“Our mother had suffered a heart attack and was in the intensive care unit at the hospital. The call had come in four days before. I was numb and panicked. As I walked to the telephone booth, I had a feeling my mother was already dead, and I felt sickening waves of remorse. All these years, I had seen my mother as a carping, needy, perpetually dissatisfied woman, overflowing with fury, dire warnings, and sobbing suicidal threats. In recent years, I had not visited her that often, and when I did, I kept our conversations safe and falsely cheerful so that she could not affect me. Now, fearing she was dead, I recalled one of our more recent exchanges. “If I die, what you remember?” she asked. “I would remember many things,” I said. “Like what?” I was flummoxed. “Like, you know, things, like, you were my mother.” She said in a tearful, quavering voice, “I think you know little percent of me.” That day, in a parking lot, I made a promise to whatever deity was out there and in charge of miracles: If my mother lived, I would listen—really listen—as she told her stories. I would thank her for her advice—and I would even take her to China to really get to know her.” Amy Tan preface for The Joy Luck Club
Amy’s mum lived, and so keeping her promise, she wrote the Joy Luck Club.
I really enjoyed this book, like all good books he left me with more questions than answers. How much do we inherit from our mothers? Can you inherit pain? Can we ever really know our mothers?
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