![]() ![]() ![]() The tragedies woven into all their stories are heart-wrenching and at times jolting. The mothers all experienced or witnessed trauma before emigrating to the US and their experiences in San Francisco are at times punctuated with suffering. Unsurprisingly, their stories are at moments very intense. It is the interconnectedness of these stories that makes the novel so successful the daughters and the mothers become more dynamic and interesting through one another’s memories and experiences. As I did so I realized that through the mothers’ stories the reader comes to know the daughters, just as the daughters’ stories shed light on their mothers. I found myself jotting down notes so as to keep the various women’s stories straight in my mind. The novel takes the reader through all eight women’s perspectives, from late 20th century San Francisco to China many years prior.Īt first, I found the shifts in narrative and perspective a bit jolting, but as I grew to know the mothers and daughters, I appreciated Tan’s style. It is a story about the complicated nature of mother-daughter relations, compounded by the unshared, unknown, unspoken backgrounds of the immigrant mothers. Throughout the novel Tan interweaves the stories of four mothers-all Chinese women who ended up in San Francisco-and their American-born daughters. I found The Joy Luck Club deserving of its prestige as an iconic book capturing the Chinese-American experience. I have meant to read Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1990) for years. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |