1. )Jing Mei is the daughter of Suyuan who is part of the joy luck club. When Suyuan dies, Jing Mei has to replace her mother at the joy luck club. Jing Mei has to step up and fulfill her mother’s wish: To meet Suyuan’s twin daughters and tell them about Suyuan’s life. Also, jing mei’s mother is always criticizing her, wich Jing Mei takes as a lack of affection, but actually it is because that is the only way for her other to show love. Jing mei is now thirty six years old. Her mother is dead, and she is on a train, going back to china.
She’s going to Guangzhou first where her seventy two year old father Canning Woo lives to visit her aunt, whom she hasn’t seen in ten years. She will then see her two half sisters for the first time (the ones abandoned on the side of the road). Suyuan had died three months earlier so auntie Lindo told jing to write back and pretend as if her mother was still alive, and meet them in china. In the end they all take a picture and they all have characteristics of their mother, I almost cried.
Suyuan woo is the founder of the joy luck club, she starts the club while waiting for the Japanese to invade Kweilin. She wanted to bring together a small group of women to celebrate, eat, and play mahjong. She thinks her daughter jing mei can become a child prodigy. In china she gave birth to twin girls, she hears of the Japanese that will most likely kill her and her kids, she flees with a few possessions, her kids, and a wheelbarrow. She soon becomes tired and the wheelbarrow breaks.
So she is forced to leave her kids, stuff their shirts with a photo,money,and jewelry inside a bush next to a house in hopes that someone will take care of them it was her only choice if she would’ve taken them with her they all would’ve died. Suyuan loses her entire family and moves to California, remarries, learns English, and has a child(jing mei). Finally, she dies because of a blood vessel in her brain burst after yelling too much. Waverly Jong is a child prodigy at chess her mother and father are lind and tin jong. Waverly feels as if her mother shows her off because of her chess skills.
Also, Waverly has dreams and visions in one of them, she dreamed of playing chess but as if they were people. Because her chess skills were so stellar her mother made Waverly siblings do the dishes instead of her. When lindo Jong was just two years old a matchmaker came to her house and assigned her her husband (Tyan-Yu). He was very spoiled. When lindo was twelve, the summer the heavy rains came. The fen river destroyed their wheat, and made their house unlivable. The whole family moved to Wushi except Lindo who instead stayed with the Huangs.
Her future husband disrespected Lindo in every possible manner over the next couple of years. When Lindo was sixteen they were ready to get married, even though they chose a lucky day the wedding was very unlucky it rained and nobody came except servants and their children along with a few villagers. They lit a candle that had two ends, both ends had to burn all night till there was nothing but ashes, but the matchmaker got scared because of the lightning(thought it was the Japanese bombs) and ran out. So Lindo ran to watch the candle and her husbands candle went out.
The next morning the match maker lied and said her job is done and poured the ashes onto a red cloth. Lindo and Tyan did not sleep in the same bed for a couple of months but one day Huang Taitai remarked why she is not sleeping with her son so that night she slept with him, expecting him to touch but he never did so after a couple of nights she took of her gown but Tyan was scared he was like a boy who had never grown up. She eventually thought of him not as a husband, but as a younger brother. eventually , the matchmaker came because she was not making babies and stripped lindo of her gold jewelry.
Then one day she devised a plan to escape, it worked and she got a rail ticket to Peking , and enough money to go to America. She then grows up and has a kid who only looks Chinese but acts American. Her daughter is going to get remarried Leonardo is proud of her daughter, but her daughter is not proud of her. When lindo arrived she paid a smart girl that in turn told her what to do and what not to do. She said to marry an American husband, or have a baby, and to be a student of theology. She then worked as a fortune cookie make in a factory.
There she met Auntie An-mei she then told her that her husbands friend is Chinese, but is not a citizen, but he knows hot to make one(wink). So she marries the man (Tin-Jong) even though their differences. Nine months later she married, and had a baby named Winston An-Mei Hsu did not know her father except of a painting that always seemed to be looking at her. she was always told her mother was a ghost but she appeared one day. She wanted An-Mei to come with her and everyone was arguing that no one noticed that the hot soup pot spilled all over An-Mei neck until it was too late.
She almost died, her mother left and Popo would help her get better by tending to her neck every day. Her mother tried to save her mother but couldn’t so popo died. An-Mei then grows up and has a daughter whose marriage is falling apart. Ying yang is born wealthy, she had two half sisters named number two and number three, they rented a boat with a famous chef to have a ceremony and see the moon lady. But yin yang is playing with the fish and ends up getting spots of blood, flecks of fish scales, bits of feather and mud on her new clothes. So in a frantic attempt to hide it, she “covers” it with turtles blood.
Amah(her nurse maid) terrified, found her covered with blood, she thought An-Mei was hurt and when she found nothing she stripped of her jacket and pants. Amah left her crying in the back of the boat. She then saw the moon lady and allegedly everyone else saw her too, there was a bang of firecrackers which unnerved An-Mei, so she fell into the water. Drowning, a rowboat picked her up and took her to the shore. She then saw a moon lady, which was not a moon lady… she took of her hair long gown… and suddenly became a man. Yin yang then has a child (Lena) whom she then moves in with.
Her daughter does not want babies and based on the information in the book she is an architecture. When yin yang was sixteen she met a man at a party, an evil man,a man that she had no idea why they married but for some reason Yin yang was attracted to him. She loved this man. But after they wed this man left a lot on business trips and one time he didn’t come back, her youngest aunt told her of prostitutes, a girl younger than Ying left mysteriously for Hong kong soon after her husband disappeared. So she told Lena of all this, she told Lena that she aborted the baby.
She then moved to Shanghai, where she lived for ten years in this dirt poor country. She then left and me a man named Saint Clair they built a relationship for four years, then they wed. Saint took her to America. Lena st. Clair is the daughter of Betty st. clair Betty does not fully explain everything to her daughter and so does her daughter when the school calls she translates/lies and tell her mother because she is of not understanding. They move across the bay to San francisco and up a hill in north beach, to an Italian neighborhood. Her mother busies herself by re-arranging everything.
She was also expecting a baby, but the baby came out deformed, without a brain, Betty turned a little crazy that day. She slowly fell apart, piece by piece. She would have mental breakdowns in the middle of things. Lena did not want to eat when she was young, so her mother told her if she did not eat, then the ugly boy Arnold would be her future husband. So she ate every day, but eventually forgot and at the age of seventeen Arnold died of measles complications. instead she then married a man named Harold who had good qualities. They worked at a company and Lena believed he could start his own, better company.
So Lena moved in with Harold. There company moved, but lena feels weird they still divided everything in half which is strange. Lena eventually has an outbreak because she is sick of the adding,subtracting and splitting everything. Rose as a child was scared of the dark, and dreams. Her mother tries to make her listen to only what she said. More than thirty years later she was still trying to make her listen. Ted and Rose were getting a divorce. She loved Ted but he physically abused her. He sent her a check of ten thousand dollars and no cents.
Rose does not sign the divorce papers, but instead wants to own the house and fight the case. 2. )The Joy Luck Club uses text structure to create mystery, tension, and surprise by going back and forth in between different stories. Amy Tan used a lot of flashbacks to deepen the plots, which resulted in her stories to be confusing at times. The book was unique and surprising thanks to flashback. Also, the story was unpredictable, so the moral/meaning was hard to figure out at times. 3. ) 4. )The story is narrated by a total of eight characters: 4 mothers and their 4 daughters.
This type of narration allows you to see the story from different point of views and understand what was done and why. If only one mother would have narrated the whole story the whole thing would’ve been different, including plot, setting,and bias. Which would have resulted in everything to be a very limited point of view. Same thing if it was narrated by only one daughter. This book is unique because it went in depth which one character cannot achieve. This book is different from anything i’ve ever read because it’s just stories crammed into chapter with little plot twists, every character is related or connected in some way. 5. )
