Although outwardly they are well established in their new lives, the mothers never assimilate entirely they never acquire fluent English, never relinquish the rituals and ceremonies of their pasts, and never forget their Chinese years. As immigrants, they have had to make significant changes in their lives they have been forced to unpack their personal archives of pain and loss and to reassess their ambitions. Born in China and veterans of tremendous hardship and tragedy, the aging but still feisty mothers daily negotiate the significant events of their current lives through a minefield of memories of their youth in China, through stories of the pride and misery that marked their lives before their immigration to America. Significant differences are evident between the novel’s two groups of women.

To correct an imbalance of players and to fill the empty East corner left by Suyuan at the mah-jong table, the three remaining members have asked her daughter, Jing-mei, to join them as her mother’s replacement. The club of the title-a mah-jong-and-investment group formed by four Chinese immigrant women in the late 1940s-has met for over thirty years, and the novel opens shortly after the death of founding member Suyuan Woo. Structured as a series of personal narratives about eight women-four pairs of mothers and daughters- The Joy Luck Club chronicles the lives of its protagonists and traces the connections between the multiple cultures through which the women must negotiate their lives. and, finally, the universality of Tan’s themes’’ (Koenig 82). Even less ebullient reviews acknowledged the fact that Tan’s novel ‘‘strikes deep roots’’ (Pollard 44) and that readers ‘‘cannot help being charmed, however, by the sharpness of observation. With the delicacy of a butterfly she touches on matter that is ineradicable and profound’’ (19). is marvelously alert to the rich ambivalence in her material.

From the Times Educational Supplement came the following: ‘‘Amy Tan. Publishers Weekly called the novel ‘‘intensely poetic, startlingly imaginative and moving,’’ describing it as ‘‘on the order of Maxine Hong Kingston’s work, but more accessible, its Oriental orientation an irresistible magnet. The majority of reviews of The Joy Luck Club were strongly positive. Before the end of its first year, it had been named a selection for both the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Club foreign rights had been sold for Italy, France, Japan, Sweden, and Israel serial rights went to the Atlantic magazine, Ladies Home Journal, and San Francisco Focus and audio rights had been purchased by Dove. The book was a tremendous critical and commercial success from the beginning. With the publication of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, in 1988, Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) became a household name. Critical Analysis of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

The joy luck club writer