The English Book Club: The Joy Luck Club

In September we shall discuss Amy Tan’s first novel The Joy Luck Club.

An astute storyteller, the author provides us with the accounts of four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s telling the stories. 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. United in loss and new hope for their daughters’ futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. 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. The book was also adapted into a 1993 film.

The group is open to anyone and meets on a monthly basis, last Friday of the month. The discussions are intended as presentations of literary works and as language practice, as they take place exclusively in English. The club meeting will be moderated by one of its members.