Joy Luck Club, The

Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club (1989) consists of 20 chapters divided into four cycles of narration. The first and fourth cycles present the stories of four mothers, and the second and third the stories of their daughters. The mothers belong to the generation of Chinese women born at the turn of the century who experienced transition in the society from Confucian to Communist order, World War II and Japanese invasion, immigration to America, and assimilation into the American society. The monologues of the daughters deal with the struggle of Asian Americans to find their identity in the post-civil rights era in American society.

Tan does not present monolithic images of Chinese and American society because her characters come from different families, classes, and regions. This also enables her to counteract negative stereotypes about Chinese Americans. Each protagonist is faced with a task to define herself in a moment of conflict or loss. The mothers have Chinese belief systems that help them to cope with war, immigration, and family crises; the daughters feel divided between Chinese and American customs, which is reflected in their stories through lack of communication and misunderstandings with their mothers.

The form and the structure of the novel are in unison with narrative strategies because they reflect themes of connectedness and disconnectedness in the novel. The narration shifts between the omniscient narrator in the prologues and first-person narration in the monologues, which allows for relativity of experience. The function of four prologues (with fantastic content that has roots in Chinese culture) is to present a background for each narration and to connect different protagonists and their monologues, their Chinese past and American present. Overlapping of reality and fantasy, history and narration, questions the idea that there is only one version of history. Tan uses historiographic metafiction by focusing on the stories of women and immigrants and by subverting institutionalized national Chinese and American history.