The Joy Luck Club | Drowning in America, Starving for China

In her assessment of The Joy Luck Club, which she calls a "stunningly devotional tour deforce," American fiction and non-fiction writer Carolyn See determines that the novel "is about the way the past distances itself away from the present." Its protagonists, are looking for their pasts—the older women for the pasts they have lost, the younger starving "for a past they can never fully understand."

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. 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 Page 26, you know you won't be doing anything of importance until you have finished this novel.

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,...

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