The Joy Luck Club

Four mothers, four daughters, four families. Their stories shift like the winds blowing from the east, west, north, and south—depending on who is telling them.

In 1949, four Chinese women, recently immigrated to San Francisco, begin meeting every week to play mahjong and share stories of what they left behind in China. Bound by their losses and a newfound hope for their daughters’ futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, dismiss their mothers’ advice as irrelevant to their modern American lives—until the upheavals in their own lives reveal just how much they have inherited from their mothers’ pasts, without even realizing it.

With wit and nuance, Amy Tan explores the sometimes painful, often tender, and always profound bond between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets and attempts to untangle the truth of her own life, the threads only tighten, weaving into one another. The mothers alternate between pride and despair over their daughters, while the daughters receive their mothers' words with reluctance, yet feel the inevitable power of the bond between them. Tan is a masterful storyteller, drawing the reader into these intricate lives, thick with secrets.