The Joy Luck Club (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)
At a glance:
- Author: Amy Tan
- First Published: 1989
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Psychological realism
- Time of Work: The 1910’s, the 1940’s, the 1960’s, and 1987
- Setting: San Francisco, California; and China
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Social realism, Domestic realism, Family literature
- Subjects: North America or North Americans, Self-discovery, United States or Americans, Mothers, Parents and children, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Marriage, California, West, U.S., Asia or Asians, Immigration or emigration, Multiculturalism, Women, Divorce, Lifestyles, Bilingualism, Asian Americans, China or Chinese people, Chinese Americans, Career women, Luck or misfortune
- Locales: San Francisco, CA, China
Characters Discussed
Suyuan Woo, the founder of the Joy Luck Club, which meets monthly to play mah-jongg. In fleeing from a Japanese attack in 1944, she was forced to abandon her twin infant daughters on a road outside Kweilin. She searched for them until 1949, when she immigrated to San Francisco with her second husband. Her daughter Jing-mei was born in 1951. Suyuan secretly continued looking for her other daughters until her death at the age of seventy-two, two months before the book opens.
Jing-mei (June) Woo, a thirty-six-year- old college dropout who writes...
[The entire page is 1157 words long]
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