The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan 1989

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
immigration China mothers daughters

Our Take

Four mothers, four daughters, stories that travel between 1940s China and 1980s San Francisco. Tan makes the gap between generations into a series of untranslatable inheritances — trauma the mothers cannot articulate and daughters cannot understand they are carrying. The stories that are finally told arrive too late and exactly on time.

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