’ ” But the book is dedicated by the author: “To my mother and the memory of her mother. “ ‘What can I tell them about my mother?’ ” Jing-mei blurts. On her first night at the mah-jongg table, her mother’s friends revealed to Jing-mei that she has two half-sisters still in China, and that the Joy Luck ladies have saved money so that she, Jing-mei, can go home to tell them about their mother. It’s gone, gone, and yet the past holds the only keys to meaning in every life examined here. “The Joy Luck Club” is about the way the past distances itself from the present as speedily as a disappearing star on a “Star Trek” rerun. Hunh! He know nothing!’ ”īut the misunderstandings don’t come merely from vagaries of language. That man, he raise his hand like this, show me his ugly fist and call me worst Fukien landlady. What can you do with a Chinese couple who name their four boys Matthew, Mark, Luke and Bing? What can you tell a mother who thinks she’s getting “so-so security” from the government, or (as Jing-mei remembers her own mother deep in indignation about an irate neighbor who believes that she’s killed his cat) “ ‘. The author leavens this Angst with Marx brothers humor, making you laugh, literally, even as you cry. Their deepest wish is to pass their knowledge, their tales, on to their children, especially to their daughters, but those young women are undergoing a slow death of their own drowning in American culture at the same time they starve for a past they can never fully understand. On top of all their other terrors and adversities, their pasts have been lost as if these horrors have taken place not just in another country but on another planet. The four women who have consoled themselves in America for 40 years with friendship, mah-jongg and stories, have already lived lives that are, again, unimaginable. The reason that the men in the present Joy Luck Club buy stock now is so that every member can feel lucky and have some joy, because by this time it has become unacceptable to lose anything more. And each week, we could hope to be lucky.” We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. We weren’t allowed to think a bad thought. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. But the original Joy Luck Club was started in Chungking during the last of World War II by Jing-mei’s mother when she was a young widow, literally setting herself and her friends the task of creating joy and luck out of unimaginable catastrophe: “What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? or to choose our own happiness?. The red bean soup was especially delicious.’ ” Our thanks to Lindo and Tinn Jong for the goodies. We bought a hundred shares of Smith International at seven. We sold Subaru for a loss at six and three quarters. ‘Our capital account is $24,825, or about $6,206 a couple, $3,103 a person. Uncle George puts on his bifocals and starts the meeting by reading the minutes. We are all seated around the dining room table under a lamp that looks like a Spanish candelabra. Here is Jing-mei (who goes by the name of June, now), recording her first night as a bona-fide member: “The Joy Luck Aunties are all wearing slacks, bright print blouses, and different versions of sturdy walking shoes. Then, her mother dies, and Jing-mei is asked by three old family friends to take her mother’s place at their mah-jongg table, at a social club they’ve been carrying on in San Francisco for the last 40 years. She’s swimming upstream in American culture, doing the best she can, but she’s gone through several jobs, she’s gotten into the habit of settling for less than she should, and her own Chinese mother appears to be bitterly disappointed in her. The main narrative here is taken up by Jing-mei Woo, a first-generation American-Chinese woman whose whole tone is tuned to the fact that she is, essentially, lost. “The Joy Luck Club” is so powerful, so full of magic, that by the end of the second paragraph, your heart catches by the end of the first page, tears blur your vision, and one-third of the way down on, you know you won’t be doing anything of importance until you have finished this novel. The only negative thing I could ever say about this book is that I’ll never again be able to read it for the first time.
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