Joy Luck Club- The Big Read Community Literature Project

May 11, 2008 by Clair Button.

Have you started the “Big Read” Project, Amy Tan’s “Joy Luck Club?” When I read something that doesn’t fit within the limitations of style or content of the things I know I like, then my reading is always tentative. Until I find value, a message that speaks to me, I am always ready to put the book down and do something else. It helps when a book is well written, and thoughts expressed with character, but what would a Chinese immigrant woman have to say to me?

She could relate history perhaps, since she lived through the Japanese invasion of China, but that was a tale of misery she was reluctant to speak of, even to her daughter. From the cover description, I can see that is not to be the subject. The “deep connection” between mothers and daughters, now there is a subject fraught with the potential to make any guy run for the last project abandoned in his wood-shop. In my experience, every daughter seems to fear becoming her mother. Enough said about that. I have to sand a drawer front on that desk I was making last summer.

Yet in the first twelve pages of “Joy Luck,” I found three little gems that make me think I am going to enjoy this book. The first was the description of four women having a celebratory party in the midst of the anguishing misery of war as an affirmation of the value of living. The second was the snippet of history merged into the cultural jolt of adapting from life in China to the new world of America, complete with going to a Baptist church because it was a duty incurred to repay charity. And the third was a bit of the promised wit, folk wisdom so practical to life. Of course, if the purpose of a club is to gamble and experience true “luck,” then the skill of card-playing defeats the purpose, because some players will always win and some will always lose. What more perfect decision than to put the pot into the stock market so they can all gamble and win and lose equally? “There’s no skill in that” so of course it is the purest expression of gambling and good or bad luck when they succeed or fail.

I hope others will read this book and share here what they like or not about it.

Clair Button is the current President of WGEO who hopes he will find the luck to get other writers and audience involved, and perhaps even so lucky as to find a new volunteer for the office of President next year.

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