What is the significance of the title The Joy Luck Club?

I would argue that there are two reasons for the significance of the title The Joy Luck Club.

Firstly, it pays respect to the original Joy Luck Club, which was started by Suyuan Woo during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The first time around, it was a means for the main characters to keep their chins up amid unimaginable hardship. When Suyuan becomes part of another group with a similar spirit, this time in San Francisco with three other Chinese immigrants, it seems fitting to use the same name.

Secondly, the club brings joy and luck into the troubled lives of its four members, all of whom have endured much hardship. For starters, Suyuan lost her family and her twin daughters in a war, and settled in San Francisco without every knowing what happened to the twins. It is therefore evident that she is in great need of joy and luck, since her twins' fate only becomes known after her death.

The second member of the club, An-mei, has also gone through much, with her mother having committed suicide and her daughter having gotten divorced. The sense of community and friendship offered by the gatherings of these four women is one of the few sources of joy in her life.

Lindo has had ongoing conflicts with her daughter, Waverly, who is a chess prodigy, and is also in need of the joy offered by companionship with her friends.

Ying-ying's first husband abandoned her while she was pregnant, and her second marriage is loveless. Her second child was stillborn, which was naturally a source of great sadness. Her daughter, Lena, is in an abusive marriage, and since Ying-ying feels powerless to help, the moments she can share with her friends in the Joy Luck Club make all the difference.

In a nutshell, the significance of the title The Joy Luck Club is the historical significance that is has for Suyuan and the great need that all four main characters have for some joy and luck in their lives.

What impact did The Joy Luck Club have?

To the women who are part of it, the Joy Luck Club is their sanity. There are actually two clubs. One is originally created by Suyuan as a means of escaping the reality of war. Every week, the ladies meet to talk, play mahjong, and lean on each other to get through daily life. Explaining the first club's significance, Suyuan tells her daughter, Jing-Mei,

We didn't notice that the dumplings were stuffed mostly with stringy squash and that the oranges were spotted with wormy holes . . . We were the lucky ones.

Although people think the women are crazy to celebrate when life was falling apart around them, they do not relent, because they need the club.

What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?

The women choose to hope for happiness, which gives them joy. Therefore, the aptly-named Joy Luck Club saves their lives by helping them to cope with the great tragedies around them and by giving them something to hope for.

Suyuan forms a new Joy Luck Club in America. She knows no one when she arrives, but she meets three women at church who eventually became her best friends. The tradition of the Joy Luck Club continues, but with a different goal. While they are not facing the horrors of war and possible death any day, the women are facing the difficulties of living in a new country and raising American children who are culturally separated from them.

Now, the daughters are grown and their mothers are desperate to be understood. However, the daughters are American and cannot understand their mothers' old Chinese ways. The Joy Luck Club continues to provide the mothers an opportunity to vent and to bond over stories from the early parts of their lives, as well as to commiserate over their daughters' lack of interest in their culture.

Jing-Mei only discovers the importance of the Joy Luck Club after her mother's death, when she is asked to join her Aunties in Suyuan's place. Spending time with her mother's friends allows Jing-Mei to finally understand and appreciate Suyuan's life and struggles, and to learn how much her mother loved her and wanted to teach her. She also discovers her long-lost sisters, whom Suyuan had tried desperately to protect; Jing-Mei's reunion with them is the culmination of her mother's "long-cherished wish." Thus, the club's impact on the women's lives is immeasurable.

I think that the greatest impact of Tan's work was to increase voice in the literary lexicon.  Tan's work increased awareness to what it meant to be Chinese, Chinese- American, and helped to spawn the part of the literary experience that spoke to Asian- Americans and the cultures from which their identity is formed.  The work did much to increase voice in this domain:

Reviewers have referred to the common sense with which Tan writes about Chinese culture. Tan explores areas of Chinese life that most other writers have not attempted. Many critics note that this novel, as well as others Tan has written, stimulates cross-culture appreciation. Readers of all cultures are able to be objective about their own predicaments while at the same time making connections between themselves and Tan's Chinese characters.

The bringing out of Chinese culture, the issues of identity attached to it, and also to explore the hyphenated American experience at the time was one of the most profound elements to Tan's work.  It helped to impact society in a demonstrative way in that the increase of voice was a result of the novel.

How did the movie The Joy Luck Club impact society?

One of the primary impacts of Tan's work was the emergence of other narratives as part of the discourse.  The idea of the bildundgsroman was something that had not been extended to other narratives and experiences, but with Tan's novel, the idea of being able to understand other narratives from different backgrounds became vitally important.  The emergence of an Asian- American narrative became something that was accepted as commonplace and something that became more validated with the presence of Tan's novel.  Additionally, to be able to emerge with a multiage narrative being told from a traditional and modern woman's point of view in which specific points of contrast and convergence are evident is something that was of vital importance to the discourse.

I agree that the film did not have a huge impact on "society" in the traditional sense of the word, but what it did do was make the novel more accessible to the masses, and I feel that is important. This film gave us a glimpse at another ethnicity in the literary canon - the Asian American writer. It allowed us to see inside of the lives of Asian Americans and understand the clash of cultures that exists as well as the desire to understand where we come from. The bonds that exist between the generations and the passing of the torch from mother to daughter are also important. This was a piece about family, about friendship, and about the intermingling of two cultures and the problems associated with crossing cultural boundaries.

MsStultz has given you an excellent analysis of the novel. What I think the film did is to open that novel up to a much wider array of people. It is significant for the fact that it invites the viewer to experience a different culture in much the same way Jing-Mei does, for even though she is "of" the culture by virtue of her birth and her heritage, she is more a part of the American culture. As such, she is often at odds with her heritage. She looks Chinese on the outside, but on the inside she is American. The more she learns about her past, however, the more important it becomes to her. I think the film teaches the importance of heritage, but it also teaches the importance of reaching beyond our outward differences to understand that some things, such as love and friendship, are universal.

I don't think the movie impacted society much at all.  Yes, it was a faithful adaptation of the novel, but it wasn't nominated for any major Academy awards.

It has some nice cross-cutting, as it transitions from the 1920s to the 1950s and the 1990s fairly seamlessly.  But, other than that, it's unremarkable.

The novel, however, made a splash in the literary world as Chinese-American immigrant literature, as a feminist novel, and as a coming-of-age bildungsroman.

The novel examines the hybrid identity, as Jing Mei says she becomes Chinese by the end of the novel after she visits China and her twin half-sisters, but I don't really believe her.

Just as she never learns to play Mah-Jong or chess using Chinese strategy, Jing-Mei never feels or thinks Chinese by the novel's end; in fact, she continues to narrate as a post-modern American: linear-thinking and quick to point out things.

It is the narrator's repeated visual comparison of what she thinks will be old-world China to post-modern America that sets a very American tone: "From a distance, it [Shanghai] looks like a major American city"; "...each of them [her half-sisters] holding a corner of the [Polaroid] picture, watching as their images begin to form"; "She [Lili] immediately jumps forward, places one hand on her hip in the manner of a fashion model, juts out her chest, and flashes me a toothy smile."

Even the title, "A Pair of Tickets," emphasizes the purchased objects of a journey. After having depicted the first-generation cousins as spoiled, Tan uses positive imagery of consumerism to drive home her themes of cultural and female identity, giving as much homage to the Garden Hotel and Number One Department Store as Buddha and the Great Wall. It would be understandable if she used images of materialism to juxtapose the old world Chinese values with the new world "American Dream," but with statements like "I feel as if I were getting on a number 30 Stockton bus in San Francisco" but "I am in China" (272), Tan (or Jing-Mei) is not so much discovering her ancestral roots, but realizing that her Communist homeland is not so communal--it is as modern and capitalistic as California.