Thoughts on My First Book- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Hey guys!

How is everyone? I hope everyone is doing great, as I have got a lot to share. I finished my first book in my summer reading challenge a few weeks ago, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who hasn't read it yet. My thoughts can be summed up succinctly and accurately by a review that can be found at the front of the book: "The only negative thing I could ever say about this book is that I'll never again be able to read it for the first time." (Los Angeles Times)

As an Asian-American, this book absolutely hit home in a lot of areas for me. I recognized the tiny phoneticized Chinese phrases interspersed throughout the book -they are all phrases I use myself in everyday conversation. All the beliefs and practices in the book, from the description of the scholar’s wife, to the connection one of the mothers has to her zodiac sign, to the scene of the celebration of the Festival of Pure Brightness were things I understood acutely with a sense of deja-vu. Those words, values, and traditions were little microcosms of Chinese culture that were to a degree untranslatable to me, yet Tan’s book feels remarkably Chinese. The way she talks sounds like she had been speaking in Mandarin first, then translated it into English, because her English is the most Chinese-sounding English I have ever read. I marveled at how she translated a culture that was so natural and inarticulable and made it accessible to the American and international public. My Chinese culture seemed so insular to me; when I talk with my Chinese friends in Chinese, we laugh and bond over small cultural values and beliefs we all understand in a way no one else can, and yet this book feels completely authentic in representing Chinese culture and natural in the way it opens the Chinese world to its non-Chinese readers.

As a woman, this book was particularly impactful to me. It’s earth-shaking to be reading this book and to realize that countless young Chinese women in the 1950’s went through the struggles described in the book. From arranged marriage, to losing one’s entire family, to settling in and beginning anew in a completely foreign land, to marrying a foreigner, the situations the women of the book were extraordinary and I applaud their strength for making it through. I was floored by their ingenuity, humbled by their resilience, awed by their courage, and still not surprised by any of it because I have a nationalistic pride in my heritage. These women made you want them to succeed, in the way they told their stories with such grace and maturity despite the obvious struggle and loss they must’ve gone through. I cried multiple times while reading some chapters. For all their strong points, the story hit home hard with its less flattering angles on Chinese women as well. I related strongly to Waverly’s points about being perfect and gifted, yet feeling defenceless in front of her mom, and also to June’s points about never being good enough. I also spent some time being frustrated and Lena and Rose for not having the balls to stick up to their husbands in their respective marriages, until I realized introspectively that I shared a lot of the same people-pleasing aspects they did and that I sometimes also liked passively letting other people make the choices for me, because I myself was afraid of making wrong choices. I saw too much of my own mom in some of the traditional moms of the book, until I realized those moms were who they were because of the difficult childhoods they had to endure- and that my own mom had her faults only because she had been through so much more than I had. In the chapter about Lena’s mom’s sadness at the privileged mindset of her own daughter, I could only sit, hopelessly sad as I recalled my own father telling me how he chose to raise me in a bubble, resolving that my increased happiness was worth the tradeoff of my selfishness and lack of gratitude for everything in life. Countless other moments, lines, and characters affected me as well, and I don’t want to spoil the whole book.

In terms of difficulty, the book does not look intimidating or have archaic language and sentence structure. New readers are probably not going to have trouble getting though it and this is definitely one of the "can't put it down" types of books. Though it is easy in terms of language, I'd say the themes it covers are pretty hard-hitting. You have to be in the right mindset when reading it, and it's hard to switch out of the frivolous, routine-driven, hardly conscious state the modern mind is in so you can summon the necessary emotional resilience and maturity to read the book and fully appreciate what you're reading.

Overall, I’d have to give this book a 5 star rating. Every person should read it at least once. As the presence of Chinese people all over the world increasingly makes itself known, the world should aim to understand these people better. They can do that by reading this book. There are also some lessons that Chinese culture teaches better than American culture.