![]() Sometimes it’s pivotal, it’s just in passing, sometimes its meaning is subtle, and sometimes it’s used as a reference that anyone will understand.īefore she has to run from the Japanese, Suyuan hides in one of the thousands of caves outside the town of Kwelin. The third section, American Translation, is also from the daughters’ points of view, but now they finally begin to understand.Īs I said, food is mentioned in some way or another in every chapter. In the second section, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, the oldest daughter of each auntie tells stories of her own childhood, and how her mother doesn’t know anything, doesn’t understand how things work in America, how her mother is old-fashioned, embarassing, and just plain hateful. The first section, Feathers From a Thousand Li Away, tells stories of the Joy Luck aunties’ childhoods, except for the first chapter I just told you about, which is told from June Woo’s point of view. ![]() Amy Tan is such a good writer, though, I think she did that on purpose, to show that all the mothers and all the daughters–all US mothers and all US daughters–are almost the same, as well as not the same thing at all. The way the storylines are chopped and mixed, too, make it a little difficult to keep them straight. Each of the sections is prefaced by a short piece like the one about the woman with the swan, with nothing to say what woman and what daughter is being written about. The book is broken into four sections, and each section is broken into four chapters. It’s about communication that doesn’t work through words, but is absorbed and assimilated like food. That’s what I think the heart of this book really is: the connections between generation and generation, particularly as it is passed from mother to daughter. The other members of the Joy Luck Club “aunties” and “uncles” have bought June a ticket to fly to China to meet her sisters and tell them all about their mother. The night she sits in for her mother, she learns that her mother never stopped trying to find those girls again, and that a letter had finally come from them. She already knows that her mother was forced to abandon twin baby girls in 1944, when the Japanese invaded China. The story begins when Suyuan Woo’s grown daughter, June, is drafted to sit in for her mother after her mother’s death. The original Joy Luck Club was formed in China, by one of the current members, Suyuan Woo. They get together once a month to play mah jong, eat, and tell stories. The Joy Luck Club is a group of four women from China who meet after they immigrate to America. This book is not ABOUT food, but food plays an important part in the book–actual food, occasions for food, food as metaphor and simile, and food as symbol. ![]()
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