The first half of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan was extremely interesting. I especially enjoyed how the viewpoint changed with each chapter. One chapter, Rose Hsu Jordan would be the narrator and the next, Ying-Ying St. Clair would tell her side of the story. The most intriguing thing though, was how the stories overlapped. For example, Waverly Jong would tell stories from her childhood when she was a child chess champion. Then, another narrator would relate stories from her childhood about how she disliked Waverly because her mother was constantly comparing her to the child genious.
The first tale was set in present day when Jing-Mei Woo went to a "Joy Luck Club" meeting in place of her mother, who had died. She is accompanied by An-Mei Hsu, Ying-Ying St. Clair, and Lindo Jong. The purpose of this club is for the members to "forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck."
I thought the whole concept of this club was very creative. It takes a strong person to decide to rejoice when they are in devastating situations. These women "were definitely strong and determined. This was demonstrated through the tales that they narrate later on in the book. None of the members were very wealthy, yet when it was their turn to host the party, they did nothing short of provide the best service, food, and company.
The first time Jing-Mei Woo went to join the other ladies in the club, she was a little skeptical,about staying for long. She was only there to fill her mother's place. Four players are needed to play mah jong and when Jing-Mei's mother died, she was expected to fill he place. She planned on staying for a short while, but when she went to leave, the es convinced her to stay so that they could reaquaint themselves. They actually talked to her about her deceased mother. It turns out that they collected their spare change and had been saving it for some time. They presented it to her in the form of a check made out for one thousand, two hundred dollars. The ladies intended for Jing-Mei to use the money to travel to China to find her twin sisters whom she'd never seen before.
This gesture shows that the four women cared about Jing-Mei's mother and the rest of the Woo family. The reason they wanted Jing-Mei to visit her sisters was so that she could tell them about their mother's death. But more importantly, she must "tell them about her life. The mother they did not know, they must know now." I'm predicting that the reunion of the three sisters will take place some time in the second half of the book.
I look forward to reading the second half of The Joy Luck Club. All the stories that were told in the first half of the novel involved the women looking back on their childhood days. Maybe the second half will have them telling stories from their teenage years or even their adult years. I expect the stories to all be related in some form or another as they were in the first part.