An-mei witnesses the sacrifice, which redefines her notion of a daughter’s love. When her mother returns a few years later to care for An-mei’s dying grandmother, her mother cuts off a piece of her own arm to brew medicine that might save her grandmother.

An-mei was initially raised by her maternal grandmother, after her mother remarried in a dishonorable manner. In the first part of the novel, An-mei, Lindo, and Ying-ying relate how their traumatic childhoods in China affected their parental styles. This strong denial reveals these women’s own fears: that their daughters would also be unable to articulate their Chinese heritages if asked). June worries that she doesn’t know her mother’s personal history well enough to communicate to her long-lost half-sisters, which the older woman strongly deny. When the game night concludes, the three older women inform her that Suyuan’s twin girls have been found as adults in China it is up to June to travel to China and fulfill her mother’s lifelong wish of reuniting the family. With Suyuan gone, June is supposed to fill her mother’s role in the group of friends, but June feels childish and out of place at the table of older women, especially when they start talking about their own daughters with whom June grew up. Suyuan secretly searches for her two daughters for the rest of her life, unbeknownst to June. Suyuan’s particular grief related to the loss of her twin baby girls, whom she was separated from during the Japanese invasion of Kweilin. The four women met in a San Francisco refugee center after emigrating from China to the United States during World War II, and bonded over both shared grief and resilience. The weekly meeting is known as “the Joy Luck Club,” and the other members are An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St.

Each story is told by one of the seven main characters, and these stories are all woven together into a larger narrative about the complex, and often misunderstood, connection between immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters.Ī few months after her mother Suyuan’s unexpected death, June Woo is asked to take her mothers seat at a weekly mahjong game that’s been ongoing between four friends for almost forty years. The Joy Luck Club is divided into four parts of four stories each, totaling sixteen stories in all in the beginning of each part, a short parable introduces a common theme, connecting the four stories that follow.

The joy luck club book pages