Amy Tan: "The Joy Luck Club"

Sometimes when I read a book which has gained a, well, canonical status, I wonder how it happened that it took me so long to finally reach for it. Such is the case with Amy Tan's 1989 literary debut which immediately made her an international celebrity. (In 1993 Wayne Wang turned the novel into a movie to which Amy Tan wrote screenplay.) I read The Bonesetter's Daughter and The Kitchen God's Wife quite some time ago, soon after they appeared on the Polish market. However, now I am determined to read them once again as I see that my first encounter with Amy Tan was a false start.

Now, first encounters: I strongly believe that whether or not one becomes a devoted reader of a particular writer's books is decided by the first encounter. Let's take Margaret Atwood (coming soon in the TOP OF TOPS series which I'm planning to start here next week): had it not been for my lucky choice of Surfacing, I might have never fallen in love with her writing. As for the first encounter, Amy Tan was not so lucky, but I'm going to make up for it.

Amy Tan's fiction represents Chinese-American minority literature, together with for example Maxine Hong Kingston's (I heartily recommend The Woman Warrior by the way - a diamond) and Gish Jen's novels. The label "minority fiction" suggests that the obvious theme explored in the novel is identity, which has recently become almost a cliche. True - the life of the Chinese diaspora in San Francisco is the narrative's focus. Sometimes, however, it is not about what but how the topic is handled that decides about the book's merit.

The Joy Luck Club is not one but seven interlacing narratives representing the voices of Chinese mothers who emigrated to San Francisco somewhere in the 1940s and their American-born daughters, with one voice dominating and intuitively associated with the writer herself, that is with a thirty-six-year-old American woman of Chinese descent. All right, it can be said that this heterogeneity and fragmentation of narration reflect the fragmented and heterogeneous identity of a Chinese-American person living sort of in between the two worlds, who finally has to decide who she is or choose who she wants to be. In the book the question is answered as follows: Chinese people had Chinese opinions. American people had American opinions. And in almost every case, the American version was much better. It was only later that I discovered there was a serious flaw with the American version.

The discovery made in each case finally determines the choice to remain faithful to the mothers' Chinese tradition which the daughters gain as legacy. Structuring the novel as she did allowed Amy Tan to present intricate bonds between the daughters and their mothers, who remember their mothers as well. As it paradoxically happens with societies in which patriarchy is still very strong, sense of identity and belonging to a tradition is instilled in a girl through stories told by the mother. So, Amy Tan demonstrates the truth universally acknowledged that although public (written, official) discourse is the domain of men, it is women's (mothers') private (oral, unofficial) stories whispered in one's ear before sleep that make one what they are.

In the novel the mothers, all brought up in Chinese patriarchy silencing women, teach their daughters obedience to the tradition of their Chinese ancestors but also, again paradoxically, encourage them to speak up for themselves: My mother once told me why I was so confused all the time. She said I was without wood. ... "A girl is like a young tree," she said. "You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild, in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away."

By depicting her protagonists as strong and powerful, Amy Tan debunks the myth of helpless Chinese women subjected to men whom they owe respect, obedience and servitude. It is women who rule this world thanks to their beliefs in the Yin people and the uncanny power of ghosts. And it is this legacy that the mothers pass to their daughters and make them powerful thanks to - a third paradox - the fact that they are Chinese. A jewel of a book? - yes.

P.S. Here is a nice Barnes&Noble interview with Amy Tan in which she reveals who the Yin people are and talks about her childhood, her career before writing (you'd never guess) and her struggling with Lyme disease: