The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
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Reading Club Session: 30 May 2019
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In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. With wit and wisdom, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between these four women and their American-born daughters. As each reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined...
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Questions for discussion
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Shmoop reading guide to The Joy Luck Club
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Amy Tan
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Writer. Born February 19, 1952 in Oakland, California. Tan grew up in Northern California, but when her father and older brother both died from brain tumors in 1966, she moved with her mother and younger brother to Europe, where she attended high school in Montreux, Switzerland. She returned to the United States for college, attending Linfield College in Oregon, San Jose City College, San Jose State University, the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of California at Berkeley.
After college, Tan worked as a language development consultant and as a corporate freelance writer. In 1985, she wrote the story "Rules of the Game" for a writing workshop, which formed the early foundation for her first novel The Joy Luck Club. Published in 1989, the book explored the relationship between Chinese women and their Chinese-American daughters, and became the longest-running New York Times bestseller for that year. The Joy Luck Club received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award. It has been translated into 25 languages, including Chinese, and was made into a major motion picture for which Tan co-wrote the screenplay.
