Some of us fell in love with The Joy Luck Club before we ever saw the movie.We carried Amy Tan's women around in our heads. Mothers. Daughters. Wo
Some of us fell in love with The Joy Luck Club before we ever saw the movie.
We carried Amy Tan’s women around in our heads. Mothers. Daughters. Women trying to explain themselves across oceans, generations, languages and wounds. Then in 1993, there they were on a movie screen: eight Asian women at the center of a major American film, complicated enough to be loving and angry, wounded and wise, difficult and tender, sometimes wrong and sometimes the only person in the room who could see what was happening.
Hollywood itself knew this was unusual. The project had been considered difficult to sell because it centered Asian women, had no conventional movie stars and didn’t fit the industry’s idea of an obvious commercial hook. Amy Tan later wrote about the uncomfortable feeling that the movie was being treated almost like a test of whether Asian-American stories could succeed. Contemporary reporting described it as a breakthrough for Asian-American performers and filmmakers.
And then Hollywood did what Hollywood has done so many times. It didn’t build nearly enough on what had just happened.
That disappointment has followed the film. The Academy itself now calls The Joy Luck Club a landmark, noting how rare films about the Chinese immigrant experience were in Hollywood when it was released. In 2018, the Academy brought the cast and filmmakers back together for a 25th-anniversary celebration.
Some of us could have told them in 1993. We knew we had seen something.
But watching The Joy Luck Club again as a grown woman, and then as a growner woman, is another experience altogether. Because beneath the beautiful mother-daughter story is another story about women.
Time changes.
Countries change.
Money changes.
Women gain education. Women get jobs. Women immigrate. Women marry different kinds of men. Laws change. Houses get bigger. Kitchens become more modern.
And somehow women keep finding themselves being asked to disappear.
Here are ten things I notice now and relate to. This is what many of us mean when we talk about how girls are socialized around the globe. Girlhood is a very unique experience. I appreciated the mirror of this phenomenal work.
1. Somebody is always teaching a woman how much of herself she is allowed to keep.
That lesson doesn’t arrive the same way for every woman in this film.
For one woman, it comes through marriage. For another, family. For another, shame. For another, money. For another, the quiet habit of letting somebody else decide.
That is important.
Control doesn’t have one costume.
Sometimes it walks into the room looking so ordinary that a woman doesn’t recognize it until years later.
Affirmation: I am allowed to notice when being loved keeps requiring less and less of me to remain.
2. An-mei’s mother shows us what happens when a woman’s reputation becomes everybody else’s property.
Her story is painful because control extends beyond one relationship. Sexual exploitation, concubinage, family status and disgrace shape what happens to her.
The social order has already decided what kind of woman she is allowed to be.
Women know something about this even when the particulars are completely different.
There are still women who carry secrets because telling the truth would make them the scandal.
Women who survived something and learned quickly that everybody wanted to discuss their behavior before discussing what had been done to them.
That old machinery knows how to find new clothes.
Affirmation: What somebody did to me does not become evidence against my character.
3. Ying-ying reminds us that a woman can survive and still lose sight of herself.
There are wounds that don’t announce themselves every morning.
You cook. Work. Raise children. Laugh sometimes. Remember birthdays. Pay bills. Keep moving.
And somewhere beneath all that competence lives a woman who hasn’t completely returned to herself.
I think older women may understand Ying-ying differently than we did when we first met her.
Survival is precious.
But survival is not the end of the story.
Affirmation: I survived what happened. I am also allowed to recover parts of myself that survival asked me to put away.
4. Then the daughters get to America. And surely everything is different.
It is.
That’s the point.
These daughters have freedoms their mothers did not have. They have education, careers, American lives and different expectations.
Yet the film refuses to give us the comforting little ending where geography cures women’s problems.
The details change.
The underlying question follows them:
How much of yourself are you willing to surrender to keep a relationship?
Now we’re talking.
5. Lena and Harold show how something can look fair and still feel terribly wrong.
This story deserves another look.
Everything can be divided. Everything can be counted. Everything can have a price beside it.
Look how modern we are.
Look how equal.
Except Lena is disappearing inside the arrangement.
That one reaches right into the present day.
Women have become very good at explaining why an arrangement is technically fair while something inside them keeps whispering, Baby, you are miserable.
Listen to that whisper.
Not every spreadsheet understands your life.
Affirmation: I do not have to call something fair simply because somebody found a way to divide it evenly.
6. Rose shows us what happens when “I don’t mind” becomes a way of life.
You pick.
Whatever you want.
I’m fine.
Either one.
It doesn’t matter.
At first these can sound like the little kindnesses people make in relationships.
But there is a difference between compromise and disappearance.
If one person always decides, eventually the other person can forget she was supposed to have preferences.
That realization can hurt.
It can also be the beginning of coming home.
Affirmation: My preferences do not become selfish simply because I finally started expressing them.
7. Eventually nobody has to monitor you. You start monitoring yourself.
This may be the part I understand most differently now.
A woman can become so practiced at anticipating reactions that the person controlling her doesn’t have to say much anymore.
Will he be angry?
Will my mother approve?
Will everybody think I’m selfish?
Should I say something?
Maybe I should leave it alone.
Maybe I am asking too much.
There comes a point when the guard no longer has to stand outside the door because his instructions have moved inside.
That is why reclaiming yourself can feel uncomfortable at first.
Freedom can feel strange when you’ve spent years asking invisible permission.
Affirmation: I can stop rehearsing everybody else’s reaction before I hear my own voice.
8. The mothers recognize things because they have been somewhere.
This is where the film gets soulful for me.
The mothers aren’t simply old-fashioned women interfering in their daughters’ lives.
Sometimes they recognize disappearance.
They know its scent.
They may not always have the perfect language. They may communicate badly. Mothers and daughters can wound one another while loving one another deeply.
But experience has given these women eyes.
They look at their daughters and sometimes recognize the beginning of roads they themselves have already traveled.
That is one of the gifts older women can give younger women when we resist the temptation to control them ourselves.
Not commands.
Not do what I did.
Information.
Baby, I’ve seen this road before.
Affirmation: I can receive another woman’s wisdom without surrendering my own judgment.
9. Pain does not have to be the only inheritance women pass down.
This may be the beautiful surprise waiting inside the film.
The mothers inherited things.
The daughters inherited things.
But inheritance isn’t destiny.
A woman can take what her mother learned through suffering and turn it into information that helps another woman suffer less.
That is not wasting the pain.
That is refusing to worship it.
There are women reading this who know things their daughters, nieces, goddaughters, students, friends and younger coworkers don’t know yet.
Tell them.
Not everything.
Not all at once.
But tell them enough.
Affirmation: The women who come after me do not have to repeat everything I had to survive.
10. Watch what changes. Then watch what doesn’t.
This is why The Joy Luck Club belongs in our film conversations about women and control.
We should never flatten these women’s experiences. China is not America. A mother’s circumstances are not automatically her daughter’s circumstances. Concubinage isn’t a lopsided modern marriage. Social disgrace isn’t identical to financial inequality.
The differences are important.
But so is the pattern that becomes visible when the stories are allowed to sit beside one another.
Again and again, a woman encounters a relationship, family arrangement or social expectation asking her to accommodate herself downward.
Be quieter.
Need less.
Accept this.
Don’t embarrass anybody.
Let him decide.
Call this fair.
Don’t make trouble.
And somewhere along the way, one woman begins to say:
No.
Not dramatically every time.
Sometimes the revolution is simply a woman recovering her own opinion.
Her appetite.
Her anger.
Her judgment.
Her voice.
Her right to occupy the whole chair instead of perching politely on its edge.
Affirmation: I do not have to disappear to prove that I know how to love.
WATCH FOR THIS
If you haven’t seen The Joy Luck Club in years, don’t only watch the men this time.
Watch the women watching women.
Notice when a mother recognizes something in her daughter.
Notice who adjusts.
Notice who decides what counts as fair.
Notice when keeping peace starts costing somebody her voice.
And notice those exquisite moments when a woman begins returning to herself.
When The Joy Luck Club arrived in 1993, Hollywood wondered whether audiences would embrace a major movie centered on Asian and Asian-American women. Contemporary reports described executives worrying about how to market an almost entirely Asian, female ensemble without conventional stars, even while audiences were responding strongly to the film.
People loved these women anyway.
Some of us loved them immediately.
Some of us found our mothers in them. Some found ourselves. Some didn’t understand everything we were seeing yet because life hadn’t taught us enough.
That’s one of the pleasures of returning to a great film.
Thirty years later, the women are still sitting around that table.
But we have changed seats.
We hear things we couldn’t hear before. We recognize silences we once missed. We understand why somebody stayed, why somebody surrendered, why somebody’s mother was so afraid for her, and why finding your own voice can take half a lifetime.
Maybe that is one reason The Joy Luck Club survived Hollywood’s failure to build enough upon its breakthrough.
Women kept it.
We remembered.
And now we can bring our daughters, sisters, friends and younger women back to the table with us.
Not to tell them what to think.
Just to say:
Watch this part, baby. I didn’t understand it the first time either.
Treat yourself. Watch the movie and read the book.