The Joy Luck Club is a realistic fiction novel written by Amy Tan, published in 1989. Tan is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant family, which might be the reason that she wrote this book, which centers around the lives of four pairs of Chinese mothers and their daughters in American society. The book consists of sixteen vignettes, each narrated from the perspective of a daughter or a mother. Through the telling of their stories, readers get a view of the vicissitudes of the families due to the changes that happen both in China and America. In almost all of the chapters, the vignettes are built around a central symbol, which I found to be noteworthy.

In the Chapter Rice Husband, narrated by Lena St. Clair, the evenly split bill between her and her husband serves as a symbol of a failing marriage. Ever since they started dating, a clear division of expenditure exists between them; they even separate the bill for dinner when dining out. However, injustice hides among the seemingly fair plan. Lena works in the company operated by her husband and provides him with all the inspiration. However, her salary is not even as high as the other workers, who are not nearly as devoted as Lena. Since the beginning of their marriage, they remain a balance sheet on their fridge about the spending of shared things they buy. At the end of the chapter, Lena cries, “Everything… the way we account for everything. What we share. What we don’t share. I’m so tired of it, adding things up, subtracting, making it come out even. I’m sick of it.” (164) She can no longer stand the balance sheet system since it symbolizes the underlying problems in their relationship and forebodes the failing of their marriage.

In the Chapter Magpie, the turtle is the symbol of the cowardice in the character of the narrator, An-Mei Hsu. She makes the statement at the beginning of the chapter that, “All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.” (215) By comparing “us”- she and her daughter– to the stairs, she points out the resemblance between them in that they both possess the character of cowardice. In the vignette, An-Mei tells the story about how her mother told her to be brave, to not be like the turtle, which only knows how to swallow tears. However, her fate is too cruel for her to fight against what she cannot accomplish and what her mother had hoped. She thinks that this character trait is also shown in her daughter, who becomes depraved after an unsuccessful marriage. Throughout the chapter, the turtle is used as a symbol of the cowardice that exists both in the characters of the mother and the daughter.

In the Chapter A Pair of Tickets, the ticket that Jing-Mei Woo uses to travel from America to China symbolizes the bridge between her American identity and her Chinese identity. Born in America, she only knows what happens in China through the mouths of her parents, and this knowledge is not even exact. Up until the death of her mother, she does not know how her mother came to America or how she lost contact with her twin daughters in China before Jing-Mei was born. Jing-Mei receives the letter from her twin half-sisters in China after her mother dies, and that becomes the reason she wants to travel to China, to see the place her family originated. When she finally meets her half-sisters, she feels that the Chinese identity in her is activated, “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.” (288) The ticket of her travels becomes the bridge that helps her realize the existence of both her Chinese identity and her American identity within herself.

The Joy Luck Club is a book that truly touches me, and I strongly recommend reading it. As a Chinese student currently studying in the US, I felt the resonance between the characters in the book and myself; the settings of the book – China and America – are all so familiar to me. When sayings and words in Chinese are mentioned in the book, I fully understand what the author means by it, as there is always something between languages that can never be translated. This book provides me with the perspectives of the lives of Chinese immigrants in the US, which I hope can be read and known by more people.