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Introduction: The Words You Cannot Say
Have you ever begun to telling a story from your childhood, only to stop mid-sentence?
Maybe everything seemed fine at first. But then you noticed that to reveal the crux of the matter - why the story was even funny, why the situation was so unexpected, why the advice given to you was positively brilliant - you would stumble over an uncomfortable detail. A thing normal and accepted in its place and time, but which - in the here and now - falls into one of a variety of categories:
Impossible. Unacceptable. Just plain weird.
(Even worse are the snippets that slip past such triage attempts. You say a thing, and instantly regret it. It’s too late though, because your listener’s ears have caught your meaning, and her eyes reflect back to you an inescapable verdict: "What is 'normal' to you is not normal at all.")
For some of us, almost everything that matters about who we are & where we came from is illegible to those we love.
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Wounds: The Rifts Between Generations and Cultures
This illegibility of identity - and the consequent impotence to influence - marks all the protagonists of “The Joy Luck Club,” a master work by novelist Amy Tan.
The vision that prompted the creation of “The Joy Luck Club” was a vision of desperation:
“My mother could sense that the women of these families... had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldn’t begin to express in their fragile English.”
The story begins and ends with four mothers, and four daughters in and around 1980's-era San Francisco. Each daughter has some piece of her life on the verge of falling apart. And each mother holds in keeping treasures of memory, wisdom and experience-- but wonders how she will ever pass them on.
In a sort of Chinese Fairy Tale that begins the book, and reflects one life, Tan speaks of a woman who purchased a swan from a market vendor for a foolish sum:
_“_This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look!—it is too beautiful to eat.
Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: “In America I will have a daughter just like me.... Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan—a creature that became more than what was hoped for.”
Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, “This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.” And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.”
But the gifts of language are unevenly distributed among the two generations. It is as though the daughters have access to a set of symbols comparable to ASCII, but the mothers have a set of symbols as rich as Unicode. (In a time and place where ASCII dominates, being adept with those symbols has certain advantages! But if you can’t load the extended characters your mom is trying to communicate with, you won’t be able to understand her.)
_“_She said the two soups were almost the same, chabudwo__. Or maybe she said butong, not the same thing at all. It was one of those Chinese expressions that means the better half of mixed intentions. I can never remember things I didn’t understand in the first place.”(Chinese words were not using pin yin, but an earlier Romanization.)
Even the names of the mothers can be a barrier: a reader coming from English-language context might find them difficult to track. The mothers are Suyuan Woo - a woman of a long-treasured hope, An-mei Hsu, the thrice-scarred, Lindo Jong, who is like a fierce wind, and Ying-ying St. Clair, who was a tiger, but is now a ghost.
Their daughters have more familiar names: June Woo, Rose Hsu-Jordan, Waverly Jong, Lena St. Clair. Well, mostly more familiar. Waverly was named after the street her family lived on: It’s such an odd detail, but you can bet you finally get an explanation of the name - after you’ve been bothered by it like twenty times!
Foreign language and foreign-sounding names are a barrier, but not the only barrier.
Sometimes, we think that most other people have lives like ours, and live in familiar places. If a Joy Luck Club mother told a story that was resonant with the assumptions of a traditional society, her daughter would probably ask, “Why didn’t you just X?” Sometimes the answer was, “There was no X”; other times, it was, “You couldn’t ‘just X’ - what about your family?”
To truly understand, sometimes we need to think the unthinkable.
For at least one daughter, the terror is that there is truth behind the stories.
YingYing St. Clair tells her daughter Lena a story about an ancestor who sentenced a beggar to “die in the worst possible way,” and the beggar’s ghost returning for vengeance. (“Either that, or he died of influenza one week later.”)
Lena’s child-imagination, though, enfleshes the scene with particulars, playing it in in her mind again and again. She envisions a beggar condemned to “the death of a thousand cuts.” The executioner raises a sharp sword, the beggar perishes gruesomely before the blade even touches his flesh, and the man’s ghost returns to haunt both her ancestor’s study.
The struggle with terror is not isolated to one family. Rose Hsu grapples with teenage survivor guilt when a family outing to the beach ends in devastating loss. Rose’s anguish turned to horror as she was forced to stand as witness first to her mother’s denial, and then her particular style of bargaining. Her mother initiated a negotiation first with ‘God with a capital G,’ (white leatherette Bible in hand) then - in rapid succession - with another, quite different spirit, which she names as “Coiling Dragon.”
Thanks to Authorial Sovereignty, we as readers can get a privileged, fly-on-the-wall view that goes back one or two generations. We can see the mothers' early lives in China - and in most cases, the mothers' childhoods, and their relationships with their own families-of-origin. And their own mothers.
We see things that defy explanation.
We see the harrowing experiences that marked and devastated these mothers decades ago. Sometimes they docilely accept the unacceptable so they can survive circumstances that: a reputation assassination that pushes a pious widow into a marriage to a man she despises, as his much-looked-down-upon fourth wife. Sometimes, in despair, they flee from the invading army, traveling towards the hope of safety and casting aside everything that was in their hands - even the one or two things they most needed to save.
But other times, we see the moment where one of these women does something different: she takes her agency into her own hands; she finds a way out of a hopeless conundrum; she plans and she plots and she times her moment just right and seizes the advantage against her adversaries. And she forms this life-shaking solution within the bounds of her own culture: using the tools, the assumptions, and a savvy awareness of the worldview. Though there's certainly room for her own special brand of creativity.
But there's also room for ghosts. A repeated motif in Amy Tan's stories is a functionally-powerless wife (or concubine) threatening to return as a ghost if her would-be tormentors (who are among her own household) go too far - a last desperate weapon of a woman who can't find a way to push against a formidable power differential.
As you read these accounts, it occurs to you that the mothers, as children, believed they were disposable daughters.
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Interlude: Using the Category of Concrete-Relational Thinking to Decrypt the Narratives in “The Joy Luck Club”
“...we are concerned with people who attempt to discover truth in such a way that ‘life and reality are seen pictorially in terms of the active emotional relationships present in a concrete situation.” In verbal communication, the concrete relational thinker tends to express, inform, and persuade by referring to symbols, stories, events, objects and so forth, rather than to general propositions and principles. But he is especially prone to rely on nonverbal communication of all types…”
-”Communicating Christ Cross-Culturally,” David J. Hesselgrave
The category of “concrete-relational thinking” as opposed to western propositional-logic-based thinking was eye-opening for discovering meaning within “The Joy Luck Club.”
Concrete thinking as opposed to abstract thinking is a concept we are familiar with - but what of the “relational” part? Think of it like this: There is no such thing as a single parallel line. “Parallel” only has meaning in the context of comparison to another line. It’s connected to a focus on of the relation of individual elements to each-other: where the people are standing in relation to each-other, or what is the placement of the strokes of a Chinese character.
An example:
In my own life, I, too, have been on the receiving end of the inscrutable wisdom of a Chinese mother. Five years ago, when I was going through treatments for breast cancer, three friends came to my home to offer wisdom, encouragement-- and help cleaning my house!
One of them who’d survived cancer was reminding me about looking after my needs. She ticked off on her fingers, “Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual,” when an excited look came into her eyes. “It’s like when you are taking a picture,” she began, grasping an invisible camera, building a comparison to the three legs of a tripod. Then she quickly concluded, “And that way, you can have the whole family in your picture!” - satisfied that the connection was obvious.
At the time, I flagged it as “something that must make sense within concrete-relational thinking patterns but not within typical Western thinking patterns.” Many times since then, I have wondered what my friend could have meant. What was the connection?
Why does the tripod have three legs? “So it will be stable.” (as anyone who read that one Encyclopedia Brown mystery knows.)
But that is where we expect a Western thinker’s analogy (a metaphor in the middle of a lecture, or a sermon illustration perhaps?) to end. Stability. It’s good thing, but is the abstract concept of “stability” a good unto itself? Why not press further and ask, “What is the stability FOR?”
Today, I think for the first time, I finally understood. When a family uses a tripod, it’s so that the one taking the picture is not left out of it. And this was her wish for me: she wanted me to be able to be “in the picture” with my family, and remain there.
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Restored beyond Expectation: Possessors of Agency and of an Uncommon Vision
“Besides a common language... there will also be, within the same group, many specialized vocabularies… Such ‘working languages’ are filled with jargon and idioms. People in the same profession typically have a language of the trade. Other people cannot understand the conversations… In every school and even every dormitory room, specialized vocabularies develop. The most widely occurring ‘working language’ is that which develops between mothers and their children.” -Fei Xiaotong, “From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society”
The unusual thinking styles - not to mention the otherworldly terrors in their life histories does not make for the mothers' easy assimilation into a materialistic American life. The mothers deeply-held desire to be understood is palpable - but it seems that they left their words an ocean away.
However, in the times of testing that adulthood imposes, the daughters had discoveries to make. First a discovery of their own limitations. But second, the discovery that their mothers, whom they have come to see clueless, verbally-clumsy, and incomprehensible are actually strikingly perceptive. It’s an awkward dance towards one-another, on a road mostly dark, but occasionally lit by a brilliant flash of illumination.
Sometimes it takes the form of a serious mother-daughter conversation, bracketed by stressful and exasperating interactions.
In response to a shaken Waverly saying, “I don’t know what’s inside me right now,” Lindo tells her, “Then I will tell you.” Lindo gives her daughter an origin story of Waverly’s life. Who she was, in her mothers’ eyes, has everything to do with where her mother comes from and her father comes from.
Then Waverly puts forward a glib comment - the kind of joke people make when they are uncomfortable because they don’t understand a thing, or want to test whether they do understand- but carve out a “safe” path they can retreat back down if not.
But her words are taken seriously by the mother momentarily, Lindo questions what Waverly means, and then the truth is out.
And just like that, the fragile connection we were starting to build snapped.
They can’t move forward that way; there is a cost to understanding, and it’s full of risk.
...We sank into silence, a stalemate.
But with creativity, the mother puts forth another way of thinking about it, and weaves in a joke. She is reaching across to her daughter and she finds her.
And then her eyes lighted up. “Now listen. You can also say the name of Taiyuan is Bing. Everyone from that city calls it that. Easier for you to say. Bing, it is a nickname.” She wrote down the character, and I nodded as if this made everything perfectly clear. “The same as here,” she added in English. “You call Apple for New York. Frisco for San Francisco.” “Nobody calls San Francisco that!” I said, laughing. “People who call it that don’t know any better.”
“Now you understand my meaning,” said my mother triumphantly. I smiled. And really, I did understand finally. Not what she had just said. But what had been true all along. I saw what I had been fighting for: It was for me, a scared child, who had run away a long time ago to what I had imagined was a safer place...
Mothers and daughters alike are finally seeing things as they are - things they could not perceive before.
Before, Suyuan and Lindo constantly compared June and Waverly - and the old rivalry has never ended.
While Waverly resembles her mother in independence and tenacity, Suyuan’s daughter June has inherited her mom’s intuitive way of thinking, and her eye for subtleties. She walks into a room and sees things without being told:
It’s her place on the table. Without having anyone tell me, I know her corner on the table was the East. The East is where things begin, my mother once told me, the direction from which the sun rises, where the wind comes from.
And she’s right.
But even more, when June sits down with the three remaining Joy Luck “aunties,” she sees the undercurrents in their conversations… she sees the pain written on An-mei’s face when a bit of gossip spilled out hits too close to home. She sees Lindo respond to try to “save” the conversation, appearing to talk about one situation, but communicating to An-mei, “You didn’t deserve that” about her own bad situation.
Wordplay, Structure, and, Imagery in “The Joy Luck Club”
On a second read, I began to see the artistry of how "The Joy Luck Club" was put together: it not only bears its own peculiar burden of (riveting and emotional!) truth: it's also sublimely beautiful.
A vase on a wobbly table is suddenly a metaphor for the issue in a daughter's life that is unstable and likely to fail if she doesn't do anything:
"The only decoration is an odd-looking piece right next to the bed: an end table made out of a slab of unevenly cut marble and thin crisscrosses of black lacquer wood for the legs. My mother puts her handbag on the table and the cylindrical black vase on top starts to wobble. The freesias in the vase quiver.
"Careful, it's not too sturdy," I say. The table is a poorly designed piece that Harold made in his student days.
Any object in a story could tell us something about a situation, if viewed with the right eyes. The structure and the analogies suits the mothers' intuitive way of connecting ideas and concrete-relational way explaining their thoughts. The beauty and structure is so much needed to weather the journey of these womens' life experiences.
Sometimes Tan concisely drops devastating truth into our waiting ears:
“In two years’ time, my scar became pale and shiny and I had no memory of my mother. That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much…”
Other times, the author litters our path with clues.
She lays out a tapestry replete with repeated words, repeated themes. Sometimes reversed, sometimes translated from one language to the other, sometimes a homonym or a mistaken word that fits oh-too-perfectly. Sometimes you are in one woman’s life story; sometimes you find the same theme - but different - in another’s. This is skilled wordplay; here is room for intellectual challenge (and emotional challenge, too). It is a joy simply to track with the author - to say, “I see what you did there,” or then to come back years later and notice - amid the many layers - something you didn’t see on the first or second reading.
The overall structure of the book includes a strange or brave choice - Tan divided her book into four sections. “Four” is a very taboo number in Chinese, because it sounds like the verb “die.” Not only is the entire book divided into four sections, but each section is divided into four chapters - each one a mother or daughter. It would seem as though this structure is screaming, “Die, die, die, die.” While that kind of fits the unremitting bleakness of the hard parts of of these lives portrayed, I don’t think Tan is exactly eager to flout tradition. (She didn’t number the sections or chapters.) And here’s something where I’m not sure if I’m right - but I imagine one of her protagonists - a Chinese mother perhaps - explaining that you can see it in another way. There are two groups of eight sections - and eight is a very good number in that system. The daughters complete the mothers’ stories, and what was like death without them becomes success.
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Conclusion: Catharsis. Cost. Catalysis.
If you’ve ever had a Chinese friend (or maybe been that Chinese friend) brush aside some unreasonable-sounding parental restriction or awful-sounding phenomenon of their family life by saying “Ah, it’s just Asian parents.” Maybe some of these are impossible to disentangle with anything short of a novel. (Or maybe they are only impossible to explain to someone unmotivated, and a novel helps many to find the needed motivation.)
When author Flannery O’Connor cast her prophetic gaze upon American readers’ moral and intellectual landscape - just like a stereotypical Chinese mother - she saw shortcomings and dangers.
She said:
"There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it.”
Amid the confusion, griefs, disasters, and messiness of people's real lives, Amy Tan offers that redemptive act. And where redemption can not be yet seen, she offers hope for redemption. And where even a flicker of hope for redemption can be seen yet, she offers understanding. And she has not forgotten the cost.