How many joy luck clubs are there

She was kidnapped by bank robbers. She grew fatter and fatter and finally poisoned herself after refusing to say whose child she carried. She kept wanting more and more things until finally there was nothing left for her to desire. She died and was buried on the same day. She was made to stay in her room for three whole days as punishment. She was gobbled up by dragons. In Scar, what is the definition of shou?

It means one will experience great happiness. It means one can never come back home. It means one will shed many tears. It means one has no respect for ancestors or family. It is the face she wears in school to avoid being called on by the teacher.

It is the face she wears when she has done something wrong. It is the face she puts on when she is acting silly. What does An-mei remember about her mother from when An-mei was four? She remembers that her mother got caught gambling.

She remembers that her mother returned to the family and was chased away the same night after An-mei was burned by the hot soup. She remembers that her mother appeared to her in a dream on her birthday. The individual stories are grouped into four sections, each tied together by emotional themes. The first section concerns sacrifice and loss, what is meant by giving of oneself and giving up. As recalled by June, Suyuan tells of giving up her life to save her twin babies during wartime, only to learn she has survived but her babies have been lost.

An-mei recalls the pain of watching her mother sacrifice her own flesh to save the life of her own mother, who has already disowned her. Lindo recounts her submission to an arranged marriage but not to a fate handed to her by someone else. In the next two sections, the daughters recall moments of uncertainty, anger, or fear in childhood. They are also stories of resistance and rebellion and the rejection of what they see as false beliefs their mothers have tried to instill. The reverberations of these childhood lessons reveal themselves when the four grown daughters face marital conflicts, career setbacks, and the despair of never having found what mattered to them.

They must now choose for the future yet do not know what to do. Through storytelling, the fragile bonds between mother and daughter are pulled and tightened, as each feels what the other means by hope. The Joy Luck Club is a portrait of four fictional families set against the backdrop of China and America, yet the discoveries of family legacy and individual identity, of clashes and reconciliation, are universal to us all. Tan was also a coproducer and coscreenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club , and her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.

Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives with her husband in New York and San Francisco.

I wrote this book with no expectations that it would be read by very many people. I had been told that the typical first book by an unknown writer might sell five thousand copies—if you were lucky.

I heard that it might last on the bookstore shelves six weeks—if you were lucky. With these reasonable expectations, I wrote The Joy Luck Club without the self-consciousness I would later feel when the book landed on the bestseller list. Instead of being jubilant, I was upset that my former life had been usurped by success that was out of control. I kept telling myself week in and week out, that this would wind down the following week. Instead it escalated, and I was soon inundated with requests for interviews and appearances, which created even more chaos and anxiety.

In part, I did not want to trust it or embrace it, thinking it was illusory and dangerous. When I tried to write a second book, I was unnerved by the expectations. I had constant back pain from the perceived weight of public pressure. Seven months passed before I accepted my new life and the joy that I could write fiction the rest of my life.

But I also wrote down the focus of my life and my writing, what mattered most, because I knew I would need the reminder when another cycle of chaos might ensue.

It is easy to lose sight of what is valuable and meaningful in the blinding lights of commercial success. In many reviews and articles written about The Joy Luck Club , it is referred to as a novel, but you have said that you consider it to be a collection of short stories. How did you approach writing these stories?

How did you decide how to arrange them? My process was confusion. I wrote a short story to attend my first writers conference in It covered in thirteen pages the life of a character from age six to age thirty-six. Writer Molly Giles critiqued my work and said it had no consistent voice and a dozen story threads, but no true narrator or story.

She suggested I start over and choose one story thread and one voice. But what is a voice and what is a story, I wondered. Which came first. Molly advised I write and see. So I wrote a story about a chess champion and her mother. Much to my surprise, I could see a voice and a story emerge. The voice was not dialogue but that inner voice of a person with secret thoughts. And the story had less to do with plot as it did with a transformation of perspective by the end.

There were more surprises. I was a success. That editor, by the way, has since become editor-in-chief of a well-known publishing company. I went on to write a second story, this one in the voice of an older woman.

In between, an agent saw the first published story and asked to represent me. I had nothing to sell, so she badgered me every week to write another story.

I did, and then she asked me to write up a description of what a whole book of these kinds of stories might include so that she might find interested publishers. I thought she was unrealistically optimistic, so I spent only a few hours conjuring story ideas that came off the top of my head, each described in about three sentences. Because the other three stories were unrelated, I wove them into a premise: They would be stories concerning five families, and of older and younger voices, all of whom belonged to a community.

The community, I decided, would be a social group, the Joy Luck Club. The five families were reduced to four when I ran out of story ideas that afternoon. I did not intentionally limit the stories to those of mothers and daughters. That naturally came to be, and I only recognized it in retrospect. When the book was published, the short story collection was called a novel by reviewers.

All of the stories in this book involve relationships between mothers and daughters. How much did your relationship with your own mother influence each story? Are there two characters in particular who mirror your own experience as the American-born daughter of a Chinese immigrant? My relationship with my mother has much to do with each story.

Shortly after I started writing fiction, my mother suffered what I was told was a heart attack. That was the reason I went to China, why I started with a story about a daughter who has just lost her mother, and who later travels for the first time to China and meets her half-sisters who were left behind.

The stories are not a mirror of either me or my mother. They are more like refractions, different angles of some part of us, a bending of what really happened. My mother was alive when I wrote the story, but what would I have felt if she had died? Waverly rebels against her mother, thinking she has become smarter and no longer needs to take her advice. My mother left behind three daughters in China and eventually was reunited with them.

I met them when I went to China with my mother in In the story version, my mother believed her twin baby daughters died during the war, and after the mother died, June learns the other daughters are alive and goes to meet them. What is common to both the real and fictional is a connection to the past and seeing what is shared despite circumstances. The subterfuge of fiction is necessary for me as a writer to find truths.

I know that sounds contradictory. To me, writing fiction is about cloaking myself in a subterfuge, making myself the hidden observer. But what often happens is my realizing some of observations have to do with what is hidden in my family and in me. There is another strong influence of my mother in the way I write fiction. When she told stories of her past, she would act as if the memory was the same as the moment she was in.

She would act out the scene as if it were unfolding in front of her, an invisible scene with ghosts, with her relaying to me what was occurring with an immediacy of details and emotions. Go ahead and kill me, I tell him, and he is putting the gun in my face, right here, and everyone is screaming, and suddenly he is laughing and he is putting the gun down. He is telling everybody it is only a joke.

He is happy he fooled them into being scared. Only a joke! I know it is not a joke. When I write, I try to see the scene as if it is unfolding before me. The Joy Luck Club was made into a feature film in , and you wrote the screenplay for it. What was that experience like? What are your thoughts on the resulting film? Would you consider adapting any of your other works of fiction for movies? In spite of being aware and wary of all the bad things that can happen to writers who dream of turning their novels into films, I had a surprisingly good experience, and it resulted in a movie I love.

In the beginning, I turned down several offers to option the book, because I feared that someone would make a film that was appalling in its depictions of Chinese people, for example, that people would wear coolie hats and have curved dagger fingernails, even though they were not in the rice fields or selling opium to Charlie Chan.

But then I met two people who seemed to understand the heart of this book in ways I had never considered. They were the director Wayne Wang and the screenwriter Ron Bass. With this outline, I took the first stab at writing the dialogue.

I would rewrite and move on. It was an intense kind of teamwork, no time wasted, a creative high, and ultimately the best class on screenwriting I could have ever taken, private lessons with the master, earn while you learn. The three of us made a pact we would not sell the screenplay or rights to the book until we found a studio that would give us total creative control, meaning we controlled the screenplay, the choice of location and actors, the filming, the editing, all the way to the final cut.

But I believed all along that the process of writing this screenplay with two great professionals was the reason for doing it. If it was never made it to film, that was fine. It would have still been time and effort well spent and without regrets. When we did find a studio willing to give us total creative control, that was a bonus. Strangely enough, the studio insisted I also be a coproducer. To this day, I have no idea what a producer does, except go to meetings and say yes to some things and no to others.

I was offered other opportunities to make films. But all of those projects would have also required that I be involved as both writer and producer.

That would then require me to give up writing fiction for the two- or three-year period it takes to create a movie. But that was a time-limited involvement of just a few months. Once again, I linked up with good people—and by that, I mean people both talented and with ethics, integrity, and a genuine heart. The series turned out better than I ever could have imagined. I get twinges in my heart when little kids shyly tell me they watch Sagwa. It reminds me of myself as a kid watching cartoons and wondering who made them.

Her mother, Suyuan, created the Joy Luck Club, and following her recent death Jing-mei must take her place at the gathering. Though this club serves as the title of the book and the unifying theme for all of the characters, there are not many meetings of the club recalled throughout the stories—many of the stories take place long before the club was conceived.

What made you decide to use the Joy Luck Club as the backbone of the book but not focus on it in the action? The Joy Luck Club is the framework, the basis for the community, and a way to relate what would otherwise be disconnected stories and disparate characters with indivdual pasts.

I was more interested in the individuals than the whole, the structure. And once the structure had been established, there was no need to keep returning to it. The stories are also connected by the kind of hope common to immigrants, that the new country will bring them joy and luck, those two things linked to become joy luck, and this was in contrast to bad luck, the kind that had plagued many of them. The club does have some basis in my life. They want her to tell her half-sisters about her mother.

How did An-mei learn not to listen to something meaningless calling to her? She learned this by learning to ignore the loud sound of the clock on her bedroom wall. An-mei cried out for her mother, and a bowl of boiling soup spilled over her neck like a flood of boiling anger.

She remembers that her mother returned to the family and was chased away the same night after the hot soup burned An-mei. Popo had damned her own daughter — and at that moment, a pot of dark boiling soup spilled on tiny An-mei. Although she can recall everything about that day, she had forgotten about it for many years.

She laments that she has kept so quiet throughout her life that even her daughter Lena does not see or hear her. How many Joy Luck Clubs have there been? There have been two clubs, one in Kweilin and one in San Francisco.

Before her wedding, Lindo watches the rainstorm and realizes the power of the wind — although it is invisible, it is powerful. She vows never to forget herself, her value, and her inner, genuine thoughts. During the ceremony, a candle with two ends is lit. Only when she can escape with honor does she leave the doomed relationship with her husband.