The Joy Luck Club
“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.” - The Joy Luck Club_, Amy Tan_
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The Joy Luck Club is a 1989 critically acclaimed novel written by Amy Tan. The story is centered around four Chinese immigrant women and their daughters as they play mahjong at the Joy Luck Club while telling stories of their past. Told in a series of vignettes, the novel is broken up into four sections, similar to how a mahjong table has four players. Themes of the novel range from the relationship between mother and daughter, mistranslations between differing cultural generations, and the identity of an Asian American. Despite its high regards, the novel faced some criticism, claiming that it perpetuated certain stereotypes against Asian Americans and even attributing its popularity because of these stereotypes. Regardless of the criticism, The Joy Luck Club continues to be read over 30 years after its first publication.
The novel’s success also led to the production of the movie The Joy Luck Club in 1993. This movie was the second movie, after Flower Drum Song, to have as Asian American majority cast. The next movie to have such a majority would not happen 25 years later with the release of Crazy Rich Asians. The movie was overall a success, gaining $32.9 million at the box office and receiving positive reviews from critics. A critic from the New York Magazine states that, “there’s something severe, exacting, exacting, and will-driving about The Joy Luck Club” while others praised that it gave a fresh perspective of Asian Americans from the typical studious, academically-centered stereotype. Others have criticized how it painted Chinese men as brute, crass, and misogynistic and how it failed to draw on nuances within different Chinese and Asian cultures.
Despite these criticisms, some saw The Joy Luck Club film as a turning point for representation of actors from Asian descent. The movie’s director Wayne Wang was hopeful that this would be the start of better representation of Asians in Hollywood. Being the first film to have an Asian director and have an Asian-majority cast, the prospects of Asians being a ubiquitous part of film and acting were hopeful. Ming-Na Wen, one of the film’s main actors, said that “The Joy Luck Club was my green card to Hollywood”. However, one would argue silos still persist and the theme of Hollywood maintaining a certain image of Asian Americans continues.
In 2020, The Joy Luck Club film was selected to be included in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Though selected 30 years after its initial release, it is perhaps an inflection point for greater representation of Asians in the American film industry.
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