Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to her weekly writers' group for kindness and criticism during the writing of this book. Special thanks also to Louis DeMattei, Robert Foothorap, Gretchen Schields, Amy Hempel, Jennifer Barth, and my family in China and America. And a thousand flowers each to three people whom I have had the joy and the luck to know: my editor, Faith Sale, for her belief in this book; my agent, Sandra Dijkstra, for saving my life; and my teacher, Molly Giles, who told me to start over again and then patiently guided me to the end.
The Joy Luck Club
The mothers, and the daughters:
Suyuan Woo-Jing-mei 'June' Woo
An-mei Hsu-Rose Hsu Jordan
Lindo Jong-Waverly Jong
Ying-ying St. Clair-Lena St. Clair
Foreward
Born in 1952 in Oakland, California to Chinese immigrant parents, Amy Tan followed her own path. Over the objections of her mother, she majored in college in writing and linguistics and pursued a career in business writing.
Any Tan's relationship with her mother was very difficult. An opportunity to travel with her mother back to China brought a new perspective.
Amy Tan's first fiction efforts were short stories. These attracted an agent, Sandra Dijkstra, who sold what became The Joy Luck Club to Putnam's. When published in 1986 The Joy Luck Club spent 40 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list. It was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a recipient of the Commonwealth Gold Award and the Bay Area Book Award. The Joy Luck Club was adapted into a feature film in 1994, for which Amy Tan was a co-screenwriter with Ron Bass and a co-producer with Bass and Wayne Wang.
A stunning literary achievement, The Joy Luck Club explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken of lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves. Heartwarming and bittersweet, this is a novel for mother, daughters, and those that love them.
Feathers From a Thousand LI Away
The Joy Luck Club
Jing-Mei Woo
My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago. My father thinks she was killed by her own thoughts.
'She had a new idea inside her head,' said my father. 'But before it could come out of her mouth, the thought grew too big and burst. It must have been a very bad idea.'
The doctor said she died of a cerebral aneurysm. And her friends at the Joy Luck Club said she died just like a rabbit: quickly and with unfinished business left behind. My mother was supposed to host the next meeting of the Joy Luck Club.
The week before she died, she called me, full of pride, full of life: 'Auntie Lin cooked red bean soup for Joy Luck. I'm going to cook black sesame-seed soup.'
'Don't show off,' I said.
'It's not showoff.' She said the two soups were almost the same,
My mother started the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club in 1949, two years before I was born. This was the year my mother and father left China with one stiff leather trunk filled only with fancy silk dresses. There was no time to pack anything else, my mother had explained to my father after they boarded the boat. Still his hands swam frantically between the slippery silks, looking for his cotton shirts and wool pants.
When they arrived in San Francisco, my father made her hide those shiny