The Joy Luck Club | Essays and Criticism

  • Exploring Mother-Daughter Differences

    In the following essay, the critic examines the popularity of The Joy Luck Club and explores how Tan uses various narrative techniques to demonstrate the mother-daughter differences and tensions in the novel.

  • 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."

  • Your Mother Is in Your Bones

    In his review of The Joy Luck Club, he provides some background on both the Chinese emigrants who came to America in what he calls the "great Chinese diaspora" and their children who were raised in the United States. In addition, he notes that "it is out of [the] experience of being caught between countries and cultures that writers such as ... Amy Tan have begun to create what is, in effect, a new genre of American fiction."