SOURCE: “Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club,” in MELUS, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 3–18.

In the following essay, Xu argues that the way that Tan constructed the story of The Joy Luck Club is similar to how an individual pieces together his or her past through memory.

The Chinese-American milieu in a San Francisco neighborhood furnishes the main contingent of characters in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. What the four families in that book, the Woos, Jongs, Hsus, and St. Clairs, have in common is mother-daughter relations. The mothers are all first generation immigrants from mainland China, speaking very little English and remaining cultural aliens in their new world. The daughters are all born and educated in America, some even married to “foreigners.” Within the microcultural structure of family, the only means available for mothers to ensure ethnic continuity is to recollect...