Why do the aunties want

Their warnings were backward superstitions. Their love was not embracing but suffocating. In interwoven voices, mothers and daughters privately recall pivotal moments from their past, as girls and as young women, when they failed their mothers in public and private ways, and thus built walls to protect themselves in the future.

The individual stories are grouped into four sections, each tied together by emotional themes. The first section concerns sacrifice and loss, what is meant by giving of oneself and giving up. As recalled by June, Suyuan tells of giving up her life to save her twin babies during wartime, only to learn she has survived but her babies have been lost.

An-mei recalls the pain of watching her mother sacrifice her own flesh to save the life of her own mother, who has already disowned her.

Lindo recounts her submission to an arranged marriage but not to a fate handed to her by someone else. In the next two sections, the daughters recall moments of uncertainty, anger, or fear in childhood. They are also stories of resistance and rebellion and the rejection of what they see as false beliefs their mothers have tried to instill. The reverberations of these childhood lessons reveal themselves when the four grown daughters face marital conflicts, career setbacks, and the despair of never having found what mattered to them.

They must now choose for the future yet do not know what to do. Through storytelling, the fragile bonds between mother and daughter are pulled and tightened, as each feels what the other means by hope.

The Joy Luck Club is a portrait of four fictional families set against the backdrop of China and America, yet the discoveries of family legacy and individual identity, of clashes and reconciliation, are universal to us all. Tan was also a coproducer and coscreenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club , and her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.

Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives with her husband in New York and San Francisco. I wrote this book with no expectations that it would be read by very many people. I had been told that the typical first book by an unknown writer might sell five thousand copies—if you were lucky.

I heard that it might last on the bookstore shelves six weeks—if you were lucky. With these reasonable expectations, I wrote The Joy Luck Club without the self-consciousness I would later feel when the book landed on the bestseller list.

Instead of being jubilant, I was upset that my former life had been usurped by success that was out of control. I kept telling myself week in and week out, that this would wind down the following week. Instead it escalated, and I was soon inundated with requests for interviews and appearances, which created even more chaos and anxiety. In part, I did not want to trust it or embrace it, thinking it was illusory and dangerous.

When I tried to write a second book, I was unnerved by the expectations. I had constant back pain from the perceived weight of public pressure.

Seven months passed before I accepted my new life and the joy that I could write fiction the rest of my life. But I also wrote down the focus of my life and my writing, what mattered most, because I knew I would need the reminder when another cycle of chaos might ensue. It is easy to lose sight of what is valuable and meaningful in the blinding lights of commercial success.

In many reviews and articles written about The Joy Luck Club , it is referred to as a novel, but you have said that you consider it to be a collection of short stories. How did you approach writing these stories? How did you decide how to arrange them? My process was confusion.

I wrote a short story to attend my first writers conference in It covered in thirteen pages the life of a character from age six to age thirty-six. Writer Molly Giles critiqued my work and said it had no consistent voice and a dozen story threads, but no true narrator or story.

She suggested I start over and choose one story thread and one voice. But what is a voice and what is a story, I wondered. Which came first. Molly advised I write and see. So I wrote a story about a chess champion and her mother. Much to my surprise, I could see a voice and a story emerge. The voice was not dialogue but that inner voice of a person with secret thoughts.

And the story had less to do with plot as it did with a transformation of perspective by the end. There were more surprises. I was a success. That editor, by the way, has since become editor-in-chief of a well-known publishing company. I went on to write a second story, this one in the voice of an older woman.

In between, an agent saw the first published story and asked to represent me. I had nothing to sell, so she badgered me every week to write another story. I did, and then she asked me to write up a description of what a whole book of these kinds of stories might include so that she might find interested publishers. I thought she was unrealistically optimistic, so I spent only a few hours conjuring story ideas that came off the top of my head, each described in about three sentences.

Because the other three stories were unrelated, I wove them into a premise: They would be stories concerning five families, and of older and younger voices, all of whom belonged to a community. The community, I decided, would be a social group, the Joy Luck Club. The five families were reduced to four when I ran out of story ideas that afternoon. I did not intentionally limit the stories to those of mothers and daughters.

That naturally came to be, and I only recognized it in retrospect. When the book was published, the short story collection was called a novel by reviewers. All of the stories in this book involve relationships between mothers and daughters. How much did your relationship with your own mother influence each story? Are there two characters in particular who mirror your own experience as the American-born daughter of a Chinese immigrant?

My relationship with my mother has much to do with each story. Shortly after I started writing fiction, my mother suffered what I was told was a heart attack. That was the reason I went to China, why I started with a story about a daughter who has just lost her mother, and who later travels for the first time to China and meets her half-sisters who were left behind.

The stories are not a mirror of either me or my mother. They are more like refractions, different angles of some part of us, a bending of what really happened. My mother was alive when I wrote the story, but what would I have felt if she had died?

Waverly rebels against her mother, thinking she has become smarter and no longer needs to take her advice. My mother left behind three daughters in China and eventually was reunited with them. I met them when I went to China with my mother in In the story version, my mother believed her twin baby daughters died during the war, and after the mother died, June learns the other daughters are alive and goes to meet them.

What is common to both the real and fictional is a connection to the past and seeing what is shared despite circumstances. The subterfuge of fiction is necessary for me as a writer to find truths. I know that sounds contradictory. To me, writing fiction is about cloaking myself in a subterfuge, making myself the hidden observer.

But what often happens is my realizing some of observations have to do with what is hidden in my family and in me. There is another strong influence of my mother in the way I write fiction. When she told stories of her past, she would act as if the memory was the same as the moment she was in. She would act out the scene as if it were unfolding in front of her, an invisible scene with ghosts, with her relaying to me what was occurring with an immediacy of details and emotions.

Go ahead and kill me, I tell him, and he is putting the gun in my face, right here, and everyone is screaming, and suddenly he is laughing and he is putting the gun down. He is telling everybody it is only a joke. He is happy he fooled them into being scared. Only a joke! I know it is not a joke. When I write, I try to see the scene as if it is unfolding before me.

The Joy Luck Club was made into a feature film in , and you wrote the screenplay for it. What was that experience like?

What are your thoughts on the resulting film? Would you consider adapting any of your other works of fiction for movies? In spite of being aware and wary of all the bad things that can happen to writers who dream of turning their novels into films, I had a surprisingly good experience, and it resulted in a movie I love. In the beginning, I turned down several offers to option the book, because I feared that someone would make a film that was appalling in its depictions of Chinese people, for example, that people would wear coolie hats and have curved dagger fingernails, even though they were not in the rice fields or selling opium to Charlie Chan.

But then I met two people who seemed to understand the heart of this book in ways I had never considered. They were the director Wayne Wang and the screenwriter Ron Bass. With this outline, I took the first stab at writing the dialogue. I would rewrite and move on. It was an intense kind of teamwork, no time wasted, a creative high, and ultimately the best class on screenwriting I could have ever taken, private lessons with the master, earn while you learn.

The three of us made a pact we would not sell the screenplay or rights to the book until we found a studio that would give us total creative control, meaning we controlled the screenplay, the choice of location and actors, the filming, the editing, all the way to the final cut.

But I believed all along that the process of writing this screenplay with two great professionals was the reason for doing it. If it was never made it to film, that was fine. It would have still been time and effort well spent and without regrets. When we did find a studio willing to give us total creative control, that was a bonus. Strangely enough, the studio insisted I also be a coproducer.

To this day, I have no idea what a producer does, except go to meetings and say yes to some things and no to others. I was offered other opportunities to make films. But all of those projects would have also required that I be involved as both writer and producer. That would then require me to give up writing fiction for the two- or three-year period it takes to create a movie.

But that was a time-limited involvement of just a few months. Once again, I linked up with good people—and by that, I mean people both talented and with ethics, integrity, and a genuine heart. The series turned out better than I ever could have imagined. I get twinges in my heart when little kids shyly tell me they watch Sagwa. It reminds me of myself as a kid watching cartoons and wondering who made them. Her mother, Suyuan, created the Joy Luck Club, and following her recent death Jing-mei must take her place at the gathering.

Though this club serves as the title of the book and the unifying theme for all of the characters, there are not many meetings of the club recalled throughout the stories—many of the stories take place long before the club was conceived.

What made you decide to use the Joy Luck Club as the backbone of the book but not focus on it in the action? The Joy Luck Club is the framework, the basis for the community, and a way to relate what would otherwise be disconnected stories and disparate characters with indivdual pasts. I was more interested in the individuals than the whole, the structure.

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Amy Tan. Previous Next. She is going to replace her mother, Suyuan, who founded the club. Jing-mei tells us a bit about her mother: Suyuan arrived in America with only fancy silk dresses. Thousands of people pour into Kweilin to escape the Japanese who are winning.

The crowded city now stinks and is generally uncomfortable — because hey, they also have bombs being dropped on them. Suyuan comes up with the idea of the Joy Luck Club, a gathering of four women to fill each corner of her mah jong table. Suyuan asks three girlfriends to join the club — no boys allowed. Each week, one of the women hosts a banquet with lots of yummy, celebratory food meant to bring good fortune.

During the club meetings, they eat, play mah jong with gambling involved , eat more, then tell stories, and congratulate themselves on how lucky they are. She thought her mother was born in Taiwan, but her mother was really born in Taiyuan. What trip is Waverly contemplating at the end of the story and with whom would she travel? She is contemplating a trip to China made by herself, her mother, and Rich. Without Wood told by Rose Hsu Jordan 1.

When Rose was little, what did she believe her about her mother and mirrors? She believed a mirror could see only her face but that her mother could see her inside out even when Rose was not in the room. She explained that Rose was confused all of the time because she listened to too many people. Why did Rose stay in bed for three days? She stayed in bed for three days because her husband had left her and she was unable to make the simplest decisions.

Where did Rose tell Ted she was going to live? She said she was going to continue to live in the house they had shared while they were married. When Rose says that Ted is hulihudu, what does she mean? She means that he is confused. Best Quality by Jing-mei Woo 1. It is a jade pendant on a gold chain. Because a missing leg on a crab is a bad sign on a Chinese New Year 3.

Why did Jing-mei leave the room while the crabs were being steamed? She left the room because she could not bear to remain while the crabs died. How do Jing-mei and her mother disagree in regard to Waverly Jong? Jing-mei admires her while her mother says that Waverly is like a crab, always walking sideways, moving crooked. How did Waverly insult Jing-mei professionally?

Who got the crab with the missing leg? In what way does An-mei say that all people born girls are alike? They are all like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going same way.

She became the third concubine to a rich man. They became birds. What emotion is usually associated with the magpies? The emotion is joy. How did An-mei learn not to listen to something meaningless calling to her? She learned this by learning to ignore the loud sound of the clock on her bedroom wall. Because Wu Tsing had arrived and wanted to be with her He raped her, thus giving her no choice but to stay with him as his concubine.

She poisoned herself. That he would raise her son and daughter as his honored children How did the tired Chinese peasants get rid of the birds that were drinking their tears and eating their seeds? They clapped their hands, banged sticks on pots and pans, and shouted at the birds to die. Waiting Between the Trees told by Ying-ying St.

How has Lena St. Clair unknowingly insulted her mother by giving her the guest bedroom in her home? What did Lena do when she was born? She sprang from her mother like a slippery fish. When Ying-ying was a young girl in Wushi, she was lihai. What does that mean? It means that she was wild and stubborn. When did Ying-ying begin to know things before they happened?

She began to know these things the night her aunt got married when Ying-ying was sixteen. What sign happened to convince Ying-ying that she would marry the man who was a guest at her house? A large wind blew in from the north and the flower on the table nearby split from its stem and fell at her feet 6. He left her to live with an opera singer.

What is the difference between what Lena sees in her mother and what her mother really is? Lena sees a small old lady but Ying-ying really is a tiger lady. Why, according to Ying-ying, is the tiger gold and black? Because the gold side leaps with its fierce heart while the black side stands still with cunning and patience 9.

Why does Ying-ying abort her first child? She waited between the trees. What did Ying-ying give up when she married St. She gave up her spirit. At the end of the story, what does Ying-ying want to do for her daughter? She wants to give her daughter her own spirit. Double Face told by Lindo Jong 1. Why does Waverly Jong want to go to China?

She wants to go to China for her second honeymoon. Why does Waverly especially want to be Chinese? Because it is so fashionable 3. Because the two things do not mix 4. Who first taught Lindo about America? An American-raised Chinese girl in Peking 5. What kind of job did Lindo get in the cookie factory? She got a job forming Chinese fortune cookies out of hot dough. What was the fortune inside the cookie that Lindo gave to Tin?

Why does Waverly like the fact that she and her mother have crooked noses? She likes their crooked noses because she thinks they make her and her mother look devious or two-faced. At the end of the story, what is Lindo wondering about? She is wondering what she has lost in coming to America and what she has gotten back in return. A Pair of Tickets told by Jing-mei Woo 1.

Why does Jing-mei feel different as her train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China? Because she is becoming Chinese 2. Where is Jing-mei meeting her two half-sisters? She is meeting them in Shanghai. How did the half-sisters learn that their mother was dead? They learned that their mother was dead when Auntie Lindo wrote a letter to them as Jing-mei asked her to do. How did Jing-mei learn the details of what happened to her half-sisters?

She learned the details from her father. Who found the babies? The babies were found by an old peasant woman.