The Joy Luck Club: The Joy Luck Club Summary & Analysis

Two months after her mother Suyuan passes away, Jing-mei “June” Woo is asked by her father Canning to take over her mother’s spot in the Joy Luck Club, a weekly mahjong game night that’s been held for nearly forty years, since 1949. Her mother died of a cerebral aneurysm, which her father blames on a very large idea that burst in her head. June hesitates, as Canning’s request stirs up the story of the Joy Luck Club’s formation in her memory.

Suyuan concocted the Joy Luck Club to combat the sorrows of her experiences in China during the Sino-Japanese War in the 1940s. At that time, Suyuan’s husband was a soldier for the Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalist party that was fighting off Japanese aggression against China and the Chinese Communists’ attempted takeover of China. In August 1944, Suyuan’s husband takes her and their twin baby girls to the city of Kweilin for safety while he goes to fight in northwestern Chungking. In contrast to her expectations of a beautiful city, Kweilin is impoverished and overcrowded by refugees, leading to rampant hunger and disease.

Stuck in Kweilin with little optimism, Suyuan asks three other female refugees to pool their meager money with hers for a shared feast each week, with special dishes that promise prosperity and joy. After the feast, they play mahjong, a game where four players strategically trade domino-like tiles to make winning tile combinations. The club’s goal is to find a little joy and luck amid terrible circumstances. Suyuan first hosts the Joy Luck Club in Kweilin before she is forced to emigrate from China. Later, she revives the weekly game nights in America in 1949 with new participants, after immigrating to California and meeting An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair at the San Francisco Refugee Welcome Center. In the eyes of these women, she senses unspeakable tragedies left behind in China, and instantly feels akin to them and their shared immigrant experiences.

Suyuan tells June the origin story of the Joy Luck Club in a lighter tone when June is a child, always ending on her delight at having hope for the future through the weekly celebrations; June imagines the story as a “Chinese fairy tale” with a happy ending. But as June gets older, the story continually changes and becomes increasingly bleaker. Eventually, June learns the true story. As the Japanese come closer to Kweilin in 1944, her mother is warned to flee and find her husband, as the families of Kuomintang officers were sure to be killed first. She puts her twin baby girls and her last possessions into a stolen wheelbarrow and starts pushing to the faraway city of Chungking.

During Suyuan’s arduous journey, the wheelbarrow breaks and she abandons valuables along the road to carry her babies as far as possible, while getting sicker from dysentery. By the time she reaches Chungking, she only has three silk dresses left that she’s wearing on her body. When June asks about the babies’ fates, horrified, Suyuan only says that “your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.”

Back in the present day, June arrives at An-mei’s house for the Joy Luck Club meeting. She immediately feels out of place, like she is a child again, even though the older generation of women stiffly attempt to treat her as an equal in conversation. As they play mahjong, the three older women – all mothers of daughters – start talking about their daughters’ successes and, in doing so, imply that June has failed because she did not finish college and was recently evicted from her apartment.

After the game, June tries to leave, but the three women stop her and reveal that Suyuan had finally found her lost twin daughters’ addresses in China after decades of searching; however, she died before having the chance to contact them. The three women – An-mei, Lindo, and Ying-ying – ask June to fulfill her mother’s greatest wish of reconnecting with her daughters, and give June $1,200 of their money to fly to China. Though moved by the gesture, June expresses her fear that she doesn’t know enough about her mother’s life to properly manage the meeting.

The three older women are outraged that June would think she didn’t know Suyuan after a lifetime of being raised by her. June recognizes that behind the anger, An-mei, Lindo, and Ying-ying are actually afraid that their own daughters would have the same reaction as June, disconnected from their mothers’ lives and histories. June impulsively agrees to travel to China to meet her half-sisters, and pass on her mother’s story to them.