The "Joy Luck Club" of the title is a group of four older Chinese ladies who meet once a week to play mah jong, and compare stories of their families and grandchildren. All have made harrowing journeys from pre-revolutionary China to the comfortable homes in San Francisco where they meet. But those old days are not often spoken about, and sometimes the whole truth of them is not known.
June (Ming-Na Wen), the narrator, is the daughter of one of the women, Suyuan (Kieu Chinh). After her mother's death, she decides to take a trip to China, to meet for the first time two half-sisters who still live there. The movie opens at a farewell party, and then, in a series of flashbacks, tells the secrets and stories of all four of the "aunties." In a screenplay remarkable for its complexity and force, "The Joy Luck Club" moves effortlessly between past and present, between what was, and how it became what is. Many different actresses are used to play the daughters and mothers at different ages, and there are many stories, but the movie proceeds with perfect clarity.
We see that the China of the 1930s and 1940s, before the Revolution, was an unimaginably different place than it is today.
Women were not valued very highly. Those with independent minds and spirits were valued even less than the docile, obedient ones. Life was cheap, especially in wartime. A mother's ability to care for her children was precarious. In many cases, issues from those hard days still affect later generations: The ability of the mothers to relate to their daughters depends on things that have never been said out loud.
How, for example, could June's mother have told of abandoning her first-born twin girls by the roadside? Suyuan, starving and sick, was sure she should die, and felt her girls would have a better chance of survival if they were not linked to the "bad luck" of a dead mother.
Other stories fall equally hard on Americanized ears. There is the auntie who became the fourth wife of a rich man, and when she bore him the son he desired so much, the boy child was taken from her by the second wife. There are humorous stories, too, including the auntie who prayed before her arranged marriage for a husband "not too old," and got a 10-year-old boy ("Maybe I prayed too hard!").
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55lmqTGbrjUnKJmm5yqr259mHJq