SOURCE: "Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club," in Critique, Spring, 1993, pp. 193-99.

In the following essay, Shear analyzes the mother-daughter relationship in Tan's The Joy Luck Club.

Orville Schell's review of The Joy Luck Club for the New York Times emphasizes that those millions of Chinese who were part of the diaspora of World War II and the fighting that resulted in the triumph of the Communists were subsequently cut off from the mainland and after 1949 left to fend for themselves culturally. Though Schell is struck by the way this book renders the vulnerability of these Chinese women in America, the novel's structure in fact succeeds in manifesting not merely the individual psychic tragedies of those caught up in this history, but the enormous agony of a culture enmeshed in a transforming crisis. What each person's story conveys is the terror of a vulnerable...