When you held your first child in your arms and you gazed into their eyes, I’m guessing that you imagined you’d be the kindest and most patient parent known to humanity. You’d love them beyond all measure, support their every dream and cradle them through every one of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Fast forward 10 years, and somehow – you can’t quite understand how – you spend your days crossly refereeing sibling quarrels, berating the fourth lost school coat of the term, and loudly lamenting the dirty socks that have been strewn forlornly across the pre-teen bedroom floor. Perhaps you go to bed at night and lie there, wondering how it came to pass that your parenting is so different from the way you always dreamed it would be? And that’s why many mother and daughter stories are complicated – perhaps they’re always filled with a little bit of wistfulness on the part of the mothers. The edges are always a little fuzzy. Each experience is viewed through the lens of how we hoped motherhood and our relationship with our children would be.
No such sentimentality for the mothers in the Joy Luck Club. Shaped by the political and economic upheavals of China in the early 20th century, the Joy Luck Club mothers have arrived in America, where they’ve had to graft and fight to build a new place for themselves. The Joy Luck Club is the story of their lives and the ways in which they’ve tried to impart their wisdom to their daughters. The process is, inevitably, not straightforward.
Their daughters view these nuggets of knowledge and experience with love, yes, but also with exasperation and incomprehension. One dreads telling her mother that she is going to remarry, while another is weathering professional embarrassment, and its unmasking in front of her family. A third, when we meet her, is undergoing a traumatic divorce, not helped by her long term struggle to express her own wishes, whilst a fourth comes to realise in the course of the novel that she's undervalued and unappreciated by her materialistic husband. A further complication is the recent death of one of the protagonists; it’s difficult to view our mothers objectively in the aftermath of bereavement, and grief of course makes you question everything you and she have said for the last 30 years.
However, the story is more than these everyday, modern American struggles. It reaches back into each of the women's childhoods. The older generation have experienced trauma and profound loss, but their voices are portrayed as almost those of a fairy-tale, sharing something so far off in both time and cultural experience that it's not easy to transport yourself back from 1920s China to their lives in San Francisco, sitting at kitchen tables and enforcing piano practice. The daughters express their stories through youthful anecdotes, ostensibly about isolated events or themes, but actually, throwing wide a window into who they really are and how their mothers' lives have irrevocably shaped their own.
But it also challenges cliches about immigrant experiences and levels of poverty and education. It raises questions about how the identity of subsequent generations will be moulded by the way in which we all tell our own stories, and the way in which we allow others to tell them - even our own children. One character seems to exoticise her family history. Her mother, indignantly, retorts, "Why do you always tell your friends that I arrived in the United States on a slow boat from China? That is not true. I was not that poor. I took a plane." It explores themes of what it really means to have left "home". Is home simply a place, or is it also a time and perhaps a way of seeing the world that can't ever be fully recreated, however many planes you catch? If as the years pass, you come to have two "faces" - one Chinese and one American - is it possible to display both at the same time, or will the one eventually erode the features of the other? And if that turns out to be the case, what do you lose, and what do you gain, in the transition?
The ties that hold the characters together are no less complex. The mothers are both best friends and one another's fiercest competitors; they are also relentless critics of their daughters, and yet still their most passionate defenders. It's not hard to understand their desire to keep their children safer than they themselves were as children, in an age where girls and women had very little control over the events or marriages that shaped their lives. Neither is it hard to comprehend the younger women's frustration at the constant attempts to make their lives smaller. And perhaps it is this tension which gives the book its almost universal appeal and which makes the Joy Luck Club such a wonderful read. It makes your heart sing with bittersweet recognition. Absolutely brutal at times, and coffee-snortingly funny at others, almost all of us will recognise an echo of the fear that every mother feels about letting their child go out into an unfamiliar world without them. We may not be forcing our children to be champion chess players, but every one of us wishes they would sometimes slow down a little and let us explain how the world works and how careful - oh so careful! - they need to be.
I returned to this book after a 20-year absence, believing that I knew what had happened already. I couldn't have been more wrong. The shift in my perspective from daughter to mother turns the whole story on its head - exactly, I suspect, as it was meant to do. In the end, each of us still has something inside us of the child we were - we can't ever shake it off. And as we move into adulthood or later life and are caught in the middle of navigating changing dynamics in our relationships with our own mothers and perhaps with our own daughters, there's never been a better time to ask whether we can ever really be simply ourselves, or whether in truth, each of our veins will always carry a thread of our mother’s spirit, and of her mother's before her – with all the joy and luck that that entails.