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From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Joy Luck Club
Dir: Wayne Wang
Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club centres on four Chinese mother-and-daughter couples in San Francisco. Wayne Wang’s film greatly simplifies the story, but has captured its humour and emotional power.
At the heart of the novel is a tangled mix of generational and cultural conflicts. While the mothers see themselves as Chinese living in America, the daughters are caught halfway between being Chinese and American, and reject their mothers’ attempts to shape or direct their lives.
Yet these are far from the conventional stereotypes of conservative, backward-looking Chinese culture versus progressive Americanism. A large part of the conflicts come from the mothers’ ambitions for their daughters, ambitions which the daughters can never totally shake off.
The points of conflict and difference vary in each family, defying any generalisations about either generation. That feeling is heightened in the novel by the way in which the different families’ stories weave in and out of each other. The director has chosen instead to tell each individual’s story one after another.
This makes the film easier to follow, but loses some of the novel’s subtlety. In particular, the tensions between the daughters are mostly lost.
The film has been much criticised for being over-emotional, and it’s true that the director has over-reached too many moments of high drama which break up the story’s continuity. The mood music is particularly intrusive.
But it is, after all, a very emotional story and, by concentrating on emotional interplay rather than events, the film remains faithful to the spirit of the novel. We see both generations trapped by each other, our sympathies drawn to even the most unlikeable of the women (men are mostly peripheral to the story, presented simply as obstacles or problems). Rarely has a film captured so well the idea of the family as both haven and hell.
That feeling is heightened by the scenes set in China itself in the 1930s and 1940s, as the mothers flash back to their own childhoods. These women were a generation in transition as Chinese society fell apart around them.
Amy Tan began her writing career as an attempt to understand the world that her mother’s generation had left behind, and both the novel and the film are superb in bringing that experience to a wider audience. Parts of the film may jar, particularly if you’ve read the book, but I defy you to come away unmoved.
Charlie Hore Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated on: 3 June 2020