An inter-generational tour de force, flawlessly acted and so well balanced in terms of storytelling

“The Joy Luck Club” is maybe the pinnacle of Hollywood Asian cinema and it’s easy to see why. Amy Tan adapts her novel beautifully and Wayne Wang pulls off quite the balancing act, giving credence to 8 main female characters and tracing a family tree going back 30 years, two generations and two countries.


But this is also a universal mother-daughter movie, impossible not to get people thinking about all that’s passed down between the two and how one generation often clashes with another. Through four intersecting stories- the movie shows us old world China, American cultural shifts, and ultimately, what parents want most for their children.


The club of the title is a Chinese mah-jong club of Four ladies who meet weekly. Lindo (Tsai Chin), An Mei (Lisa Liu), and Ying Ying (France Nuyen) are the group’s elder statesmen while June (Ming-Na Wen) is new and hoping to honor her now deceased mother Suyuan (Kieu Chinh) by playing in her place.


I thought the film would mostly be about June and her bonding with these women in a bid to ultimately understand her mother and the place she came from. Since this is a chick flick, I also expected someone to get cancer at some point. “Joy Luck Club” never goes the simplistic route though, instead preferring flashbacks that are as moving as they often are funny.


Coming back like a flood of memory- each of the women reflects on their journey from China to America. Lindo was promised to a man at a young age by a matchmaker. Her mother is forced to abandon her and from there all she could do is hope the man is not too old. That turns out to be one of the film’s ironic jokes; also funny is how she manages to extricate herself from the marriage.


For Ying Ying and An Mei the stories are a bit different though both seem to struggle with self worth. We see a China where one woman is abused, cheated on, and used as a doormat to her husband, while in another case, An Mei witnesses her own mother subjugated and made to feel less than, plus the extremes she’ll go to to make sure none of this affects her daughter.


In America, the daughters these women eventually have seem like modern, 90’s American girls, which their mothers don’t necessarily get. They date white men, go to salons to get their hair done, and get big flashy presents like fur coats.


But they also want to appease their mothers, which in one daughter’s case began as excelling so her mother could show her off to all her friends but turned into an exhausting, futile effort to always please her. Another daughter seems to have taken on her own mother’s meekness in her marriage, while yet another was so subservient in hers that she lost herself and her opinion entirely.


This all works by extension- some of it passed down by a mother who didn’t realize how her life would affect her daughter, while another tried hard to erase everything she saw out of her mother.


By far the best story comes from June and her mother. June was not the obedient, hard-working daughter mom expected and you certainly see the friction between the the 10 year old girl and her. Later, June realizes there is a whole story involving her mother escaping China during a war, and two older sisters.


Many of these stories involve sacrifice and abandonment, shame, low self-esteem, and terrible cruelty. Generally things you couldn’t imagine and probably not the best topics of conversation. That each mother gets a scene to explain them with their daughter is immensely powerful and moving stuff- showing above all that what a parent wants for their children is hope, even if that’s hard to come by.