Now, years later, with many other books and various experiences under my belt, I reread The Joy Luck Club, Tan's first book, as part of my March Women's History Month lineup.įollowing her mother's death, June Mei Woo has replaced her mother Suyuan at her monthly mah jong game. She has also appeared on PBS in a short spot on encouraging children to write.Ĭurrently, she is the literary editor for West, Los Angeles Times' Sunday magazine.ĭuring high school, when I did not have the life experience to fully appreciate her work, I read each of Amy Tan's books as they came out.

In addition, Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series airing on PBS. Her most recent book, Saving Fish From Drowning, explores the tribulations experienced by a group of people who disappear while on an art expedition into the jungles of Burma. She has written several other books, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, and The Bonesetter's Daughter, and a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. In 1993, Tan's adaptation of her most popular fiction work, The Joy Luck Club, became a commercially successful film. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.Īmy Tan (Chinese: 譚恩美 pinyin: Tán Ēnměi born February 19, 1952) is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and what it means to grow up as a first generation Asian American. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters.

Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. Alternate cover editions of ISBN 9780143038092 can be found here.įour mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories.

The joy luck club book online