Joy Luck Club
Overall Rating: ★★★.5
Characters: ★★★
Plot: ★★★★
Writing：★★★
Sorry again for not updating for such a
long time. My summer holiday plan doesn’t go as fluent as I think it would be.
Since I am going to be a senior at the end of this summer, there are a lot of
things that require me to spend my time on. I have to complete my personal
statement and prepare for my SAT test in October, but now I will leave all of
those behind and write this overdue book review.
I have been heard about Amy Tan and her
work for a very long time. Since she is one of the most well-known
Chinese-American authors, I always feel the necessity of reading her work so
that I can get a better understanding of what are the situations Chinese
immigrants are encountering in the United States. I had read one of her short
stories “Fish Cheek” in one of my literature classes, and I felt that it is
indeed a great work, but it is surely not the best short story I have ever
read. Before opening the Joy Luck Club, I have no idea what this book will
present. All I know is a very vague idea about the basic plot of this book, so
now I am going to summarize a little bit about the plot.
Joy Luck Club tells the story of four
different Chinese women who had emigrated from China to the United States in
around 1940s or 50s. The book is divided into four sections and each section
contains four chapters. The story is told from eight points of view: the view
of the four women and their American-born daughters. Therefore, it is clear
that the mothers and the daughters will have quite opposite value due to the
sharp contrast of their growing environment. Amy Tan is really fond of
portraying the conflict between Chinese and American value, and I am going to discuss
this in the later paragraph.
The first thing that I would like to
comment about this book is its characters. I do have to admit the fact that
after finishing this book, I cannot remember the name of the characters, but
most importantly, I cannot link the mothers and the daughters. Maybe I am the
only one who have this kind of problem, but I do feel it is difficult to put
different characters together and understand their relationship without drawing
a relationship map. By the way, that is probably the reason I am hesitated to
pick the Son of Ice and Fire series. Besides the difficulty of distinguishing
between characters, I feel that each pair of mother and daughter presents very
different characteristics. Their ideas and behavior may have some similar
origins, but they do varies and presents a diversiform group of characters. The
mothers may all come from China, but they are actually originated from
different parts of China, and their life stories have dramatic differences. I
think that is something Amy Tan has done well.
I don’t have much to say about the plot,
but I do have to say some parts of the story really shocked me. Even from the
perspective of me, who is born in the United States but is raised in China,
some stories are extremely dark, twisted, and weird. I guess some of the
incidents mentioned in this book do happen in China many years ago, but they
mainly happened in the more countryside area where information was not very
adequate for the peasants to understand the correctness of their behavior. I
was even scared in some parts of the story while reading this book.
As for the language, I am not very
satisfied with this book. I don’t know why exactly. The writing style of Amy
Tan is just very different from other American authors that I have read. The
dictions and syntax are just not what I had expected. Also, there are many
Chinese words or phrases being used in this book, and they are spelled in
English to sound like Chinese. Since I definitely understand Chinese, I tried
to read those words and see if they match the English definition that Amy Tan
gives. This is a very weird experience because some of the words do not sound
their modern Chinese way of spelling, and that is quite confusing.
Overall, I give this book a 3.5-star rating.
It is a required reading assignment for this summer, and I feel this book is
adequate, but not as impressing as the other book I have read in school.
However, I am also very happy now that I finally get my hands on Amy Tan’s
works, because I have always been looking forward to reading more of her stories,
and now my goal is reached. I recommend anyone who is interested in Chinese
culture to read this book.
