"The Joy Luck Club"

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews the novel, "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan, the story of four Chinese women in San Francisco who come together to play mah-jong and invest in stocks. It looks at how the story in the novel is not linear, since it involves memory, recollections, and anecdotes told by the women who meet each week and how one generation speaks to another and is able to do so across the gulf that usually separates the generations. It also discusses how the film version is a fair and expressive representation of the novel that makes changes in narrative flow in order to match the different methods of filmmaking.

From the Paper:

"The theme of the novel is clearly indicated in the opening passage as the old woman remembers a swan she bought in Shanghai and remembers her arrival in America, which was not as liberating as she had hoped: "And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind" (Tan 17). This was in the past, and now the woman faces her memories and the reality of her daughter and seeks to bring the two into juxtaposition and understanding. Now that she is old, she thinks about her daughter "who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow" (Tan 17)."

More papers on "The Joy Luck Club":

• Comparison Essay # 32877 : "The Joy Luck Club": Story Comparison"
• Film Review # 36109 : "The Joy Luck Club"
• Book Review # 32509 : "The Joy Luck Club"
• Analytical Essay # 29286 : "Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club"

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