The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

23:42But the idea that there's a lot more going on in your house in between people, in between generations, then gets set around the dinner table is super, super relatable. And that's not something that, I don't know, I was trying to think of the wanting to crack open the silences that Tan is trying to do here. And especially when I think of like, you know, the portraits of American families in the 70s, you know, the Updikes or the Roths or something like this. Even the Didions, it doesn't really turn back to what you get at the end of the Joy Luck Club. and this, you know, as we should say at the top of all these shows, we're going to talk about the whole thing.

24:23At the end of this, you get a gem you can hold in your pocket about what might be an understanding that might be possible. It is hopeful. It's called the Joy Luck Club. Yeah. And that Joy Luck is sort of a different way of understanding what hope is. But it suggests all this crappy stuff happens, all these terrible things happen, and we've hurt each other so badly. And yet there is still a place where we can maybe come together in our hearts and minds and have some kind of reconciliation. We cannot forget what's gone on before, but maybe there's some different kind of understanding. If we can do the first hard thing, which is say there's a lot more going on here than we're all saying.

25:01Jeff:Yeah. This is, I think, an English teacher's dream because you could do the stuff about connecting the fables that open each section with the themes of each section. And it's a wonderful example of how the way that good authors write a story about universal themes is to ground it in very specific, particular experiences. And the specific details of these women and of how they suffered and how they struggled and the things that the mother sacrificed for the daughters, and then the way that the daughters feel those things, those specifics are particular to these people. And some of them to the immigrant experience, some of them especially to Chinese American immigrants and culture, but some of them do then hook back to universal things about mothers and daughters, about parents and children, just generational tension and the things that set the background for family stories that go unsaid or go largely unacknowledged, but that everybody feels are there.

26:01Jeff:And this is, to get into Amy Tan a little bit, Both autobiographical and not. She was born in Oakland, California in 1952. So she is a first generation immigrant. Her parents came to the U.S. as younger people. Her dad was a pastor who came to escape the Chinese Civil War. She represents the daughter generation of the book. And she's writing about experiences inspired by things that she had growing up. Some of these are pulled directly from her own life, and some of them are made up. But when she was 15, her father and her older brother both died of brain tumors within six months of each other, and her mom moved her and her younger brother to Switzerland.

26:45Jeff:And while they're there, Amy Tan learns that her mother was married before in China, and that she had four children with her first husband, a son who died as a young child and three daughters, and that her mother left the daughters in Shanghai as she was trying to get out. She had no choice, left her kids behind. And this inspires the story that kicks off the Joy Luck Club. And Tan says in the intro, like the character June, I was ignorant of my half-sister's existence until my mother blurted it out during an argument and I was instantly unmoored, no longer the only daughter, but one of four who could also be cast aside if my mother found reason.

27:25Jeff:So just that underlying, like the first realization that your parents are an iceberg and you've only seen the tip of it? Yeah, that's a real moment. You know, I think we don't quite have a word for it, but you do go through a second coming of age when you realize that your parents are human and they are people too. And they bring with them a full life, some good, some bad, and certainly all of a complicated. this is one of the few author biographies where the biography of the the real people is wilder it really is some of the stuff in the book i mean you didn't mention here but at one point like she tells these stories about how amy tan at one point like held a knife to her mother's throat when they were in an argument at one point and they both threatened to kill each other because it like It is a huge, huge mess.

28:16And I wonder how much that was or wasn't in earlier editions. She thanks her editor and agent profusely. Was there a version of this that was darker than maybe Putnam was willing to pay$50 ,000 for to make into a cross market book? I wonder, and that's one of the things I had in mind when I was thinking about the books that come after, it definitely isn't afraid of more difficult things, but it also, I think, leaves some things on the table. For example, the daughter's generations, their difficulties compared to what their mothers and grandfathers go through are getting divorced from kind of milquetoast dudes, mostly.

28:57And leaves out a lot of the real turbulent stuff. Even Tan had her own life. and it wasn't quite ready to deal with that or she didn't want to deal with it at the very least or it's not included. And in reading Tan's own biography, you can see there's a lot more going on in the current generation's lives. And I think this is about the prior generations through the eyes of the second generation. But in reading Tan's biography and then thinking about her subsequent books and the books that come after, it really is more of the daughters are there for perspective on the older generations. And they don't quite have the same fullness and complexity that the mothers do.

29:37And I think I understand why. And it still works. But when I was reading Tan's biography, I was like, wow, she has a lot of her own stuff to get through that doesn't quite come through in this book.

29:46Jeff:Yeah, I think their daughter stories, as you're saying, do largely function to give us a deeper appreciation and a sense of compassion and understanding for the older generation. Because on the page, the daughters have these really difficult relationships to their moms and they feel like nothing they do is good enough. They don't feel seen. They don't feel supported. Like their moms don't like their husbands. Their moms don't like their boyfriends. Like their moms are not proud of the careers that they have. Like it's just why is nothing I do good enough? Your virgins who can't drive, to quote Lula, it just feels like a lot of that.

30:22Like it's just like a stab and a twist over and over again.

30:26Jeff:All of that, like, I mean, I'm a daughter of a mother. I have felt some of that. That's where you get the universal feeling out of specific detail. But then Tan, I think maybe in reaching to understand her own mother, gives us these mother's generations where it's like the hard thing that one of the mothers went through is pushing a wheelbarrow for four days with her two children in it. It doesn't compare to like the architect, my architect husband maybe doesn't pay enough attention to me. Right. And it's not fun. Don't get me wrong. Right. And how to hold all of that at the same time that like these are all problems.

31:03Jeff:Your marriage is unhappy and that's a problem. And your mother is not being supportive in the way that you wish she were being supportive because she has made such sacrifices and she doesn't think you're standing up for what you're actually worth. And that's coming from this place of incredible love and sacrifice. There are some really heartbreaking things in this book, and I can't even begin to try to rank them. But the portrait of June's mother before she makes it to the U.S., where she has to leave her children by the side of the road in order to try to save her life and theirs in a way, is just stunning stuff.

31:41Jeff:And that the daughter generations, their problems are not as capital P problem as the things their mothers felt. And they will never know that as deeply as their mothers do because they've never experienced it. And also because their mothers are not driving it into the ground. They don't tell them all of these stories. Yeah, neither of them, neither generation sort of can do anything with that history because it's not talked about in process. And they don't have the tools to process it, even if it was brought out. That it's brought out in the moment of a fight suggests like the guardrails were down.

32:15And that's often what happens in those moments of real tension is that things that go unsaid finally get said because the cost of doing. We're already in a miserable fight. We might as well get all of this stuff out onto the table.

32:26Jeff:There's a great moment where one of the daughters takes her mom to her hairstylist because mom dyes her hair at home and the daughter is getting married and wants mom to have like a good hairstyle. So that's already a rich field for like, I'm telling my mom she's not good enough. Mom is feeling that. There's like everybody has all this shame that's just barely under the surface all the time. And the veil falls between them a little bit because the tension is already so high. And the daughter is just like, you have this hold over me. Like, I love this man. He treats me better than anything I've ever experienced in my life.

33:00Jeff:Why can't you be happy for me? You make one remark and it changes the whole way I see him. And the mom starts to recognize the power she has. But at the same time, all she wants is for her daughter to love her and to see her and to think that what she's done is good enough. To be proud to have her mom standing next to her at her wedding, however she shows up. And everybody's most basic desires are so tangled up here. And they're both on the surface and then incredibly just piled up below. So good, so good, so good. Spring styles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now And they're up to 60 % off Stock up and save on Rag & Bone, Madewell, Vince, All Saints And more of your favorites How did I not know Rack has Adidas?

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34:24You're all about diving into tastes everyone in the room can enjoy. Just like White Claw Surge. It's for celebrating those moments when connections have been made and the night's just begun. With bold flavors and 8 % alcohol by volume, unleash the night. Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors. 8 % alcohol by volume. White Claw Seltzer Works. Chicago, Illinois. Their experiences are so different that it's hard for them to see each other. I think if there's a quick way of summing it up, you could do a lot worse than that. And even if you see it, I think this is one of the other sort of meta points of the book.

35:05Just because you see it doesn't mean you understand it. Doesn't mean you can't make it part of your own worldview because it's not. Just like not having it be a part of your experience, you can't excise it to see through your kids' eyes, this thing that you carry with you, these experiences you've had. You can't see through their eyes that don't have it because they're still your own eyes. and the limits of cross-identification understanding, even when people want to be seen and understood and understand and see, is one of those sort of Gordian knots of being a person that I don't think we're ever going to quite figure out.

35:38Jeff:And it's like, it's evidence of the mother's success at their mission to give their daughters a different kind of life that their daughters don't understand them and can't see them. And don't need to, don't have to have that kind of like survivalist understanding. are so different. But that doesn't make it any less painful that none of them can really reach each other. And in June's case, the character that opens the book and gets invited to join the Joy Luck Club, it's too late for her. She can only hear her mother's story through her friends and through other people now. But I was so happy to go back to this and also to realize like how well it's been recognized over time that tan won the national humanities medal and the carl sandberg literary award both in 2021 in recognition of her contribute recognition of her contribution to the got tongue tied to the american canon um three more novels from her um and a memoir about birding uh called the back which is terrific i loved i read it i think came out two years ago i really liked that book it was really great this was one of those She continued working by the Joy Luck Club.

36:49Jeff:You come out of the gate with something that's as big as this book, and it's going to be very hard for anything you do afterwards to rise to that same level. Yeah. Let's talk about our first reading experiences. I think it was in college, 98, 99, sort of later in college where I was rounding out my reading. And I was an English and American Studies double major. So this was right in my wheelhouse of things that I wanted to know about. It came out when I was 11. So I was too young to pick it up at the time. And then by the time, you know, I was 15, 16, 17, it was like a book club book that had sort of a Vaseline lens adaptation that felt, I don't know.

37:27I don't know. I think I watched the adaptation a lot later and it's much better than I remembered. I guess it had a little much of a, do you remember How to Make an American Quilt when that came out? There was that generation of like soft focus stories that were super feelings. Let me just say when I was 16, that's not what I was looking for. And that's about me, not about the works of art. But when I came to read it a lot later, it wasn't the book I thought it was. It wasn't, we use book club book to mean several different things. There is a version of the book club book that I'm glad exists and I hope people like, but it's not for me, that is a pretty conventional family drama about things that happen.

38:07And that's not what this book is and never has been. So that's what I first experienced.

38:11Jeff:One of my stray thoughts reading this was that the packaging and that the publisher continued to run with positioning the book this way is so smart and so stealthy, because this is a perfect gateway drug into literary writing and darker, more serious topics for the book club crowd. If you pick this up thinking that it's going to be similar to more of like the popular book club fiction, you have some surprises in store. The fables and folklore are difficult or can be difficult. Like, what is this doing here? Following the threads of all of the different mothers and daughters can be challenging.

38:45Jeff:The subject matter is certainly heavy. And it's kind of surprising that it has had the life that it's had, but in a really wonderful way. I read this, I think, in 1993 or 94, like when the movie was big. You were too young. Yeah, I was way too young. I was seven when the book came out. But by 93, 94, like this is when the Oprah Book Club is starting. And folks who listen to this show for a while will come to understand how important Oprah was in my early adolescent reading life. I don't know if I saw, like this was not an Oprah Book Club book, but I don't know if I saw Amy Tan go on Oprah or if it was just in the water at the time.

39:23I was way, way too young.

39:26Jeff:And then this was the first time that I revisited it since then. You know what? That's an interesting question. Because Oprah started the book club in, what, 92? Is that right? 94. 94. Oprah almost certainly read this book. And I wonder if reading this book and the popularity of it had something to do with wanting to have a book club on the thing, on her show. Doesn't it feel like she's like, oh, I want to talk about books like this. I can kind of see it. It's The Bridges of Madison County, which we will have to do an episode on someday that really does that. Oprah breaks that book just by interviewing the author and talking about it on the show.

40:03Jeff:It goes bananas. And a year or so after that happened organically, it was when Oprah started her book club. Yeah, interesting. What's it like to read? We've talked a lot about the actual reading experience here. Do you want me to clear out for mother-daughter stuff, Rebecca? I don't know what we'd like to do for that. Oh, man. It's just masterful how well she captures the mother-daughter thing. And now I'm in my early 40s. My mom is in her early 70s. And we've had some of the kinds of conversations that these women did not get to have with their mothers. So to be able to see a little bit more of the iceberg that's below the surface and to appreciate that through the lens of fiction like this is really powerful.

40:47But then the layers of immigrant experience and cultural tension, I just thought Tan captured the emotion of it so wonderfully.

40:56Jeff:Like these women, the daughters are all in awe of their mothers. They're all afraid of their mothers. They all want to please their mothers at the same time that they chafe against the moms what they perceive as overbearing advice. They want to be loved by them. The mothers are afraid to open up to them. Everybody has expectations that are unsaid. Everybody has guilt. Everybody has so much shame. There's like fear and hypervigilance and pain and suffering. But then somehow the thing that shines the brightest around all of it is this huge sense of hope that the act of coming to the U.S. is hopeful.

41:33Jeff:and the act of becoming a parent is fundamentally an act of hope and an investment in the future. And that Tan can write about such just very difficult, dark things and leave the book feeling hopeful is a real magic trick. Like that's very hard to do. And I was really in awe of that. I've always found it difficult to, you can understand with your head, but it's harder to understand with my heart. books that come out of real honor or shame-based cultures because I don't have that experience, right? Like that's, I'm American through, through, uh, Protestantism brings its own thing, but like, it doesn't have quite the kind of shame and guilt and like, you're going to be ostracized and I have the American bootstrapping.

42:20Well, I can go out and make it on my own, even if I live my village or my town or my church or whatever. And this is one of the few books where I'm never going to get it, right? Because I don't come out of this. I don't breathe the air they're breathing, so I can't quite get it all the way into my lungs. But this is one of the few books where it kind of starts to, I can feel the weight of it. I can sort of identify with the weight of it. And some of that is how embedded, and it comes to in very small ways, and it's the multi-factor piece of it as well. But I think ultimately the thing is that the daughters don't have the same access to these, the repercussions of being ostracized, the repercussions, very real material, lifelong ones of marrying, you know, becoming the fourth wife of someone or, you know, having someone say something about you or being thrown out by the family that you married into because you couldn't have the right kind of kid on the right timeline.

43:16This is one where because it's shown in contrast with the daughter generation's lack of understanding. I felt like I could understand. I was like, I could see what they couldn't see of how much of the mother's survival tactics in China don't really apply in America. And they're trying to apply things that don't apply or don't have to apply in the same way to a new context. And no wonder everyone is confused and feeling out of sorts because they're using this survival mechanism that got them here. But this place, once here, has a whole other world of problems they have to deal with in different kinds of ways.

43:54Right. Yeah.

43:54Jeff:And I don't know if Amy Tan was trying to do this in telling the story or if it's just a wonderful knock-on effect of it. But one of the ways that you bust stereotypes about groups of people is by giving texture and dimension to the experience. And the mother generation carries a lot of what we, especially in like 80s and 90s American pop culture saw as like the tiger mom, like real stereotypical depictions of Asian women. But by showing us where they came from, it's like, oh, there's a reason that these women feel that they need to do these things. Because if you don't do this right, you're going to have to leave your kids by the side of the road in a wheelbarrow.

44:33I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but that could, what's going to happen if you're not paying attention.

44:37Jeff:Yeah. It's just an incredible way to capture. I think the multi-generational lens is an incredible way to tell this kind of story. And In addition to doing that, within each mother-daughter pair, Tan captures the dynamics of a close-knit group of friends. These people have known each other for decades. And there's real deep knowing of each other and real care, but there's also competition and pettiness and resentment and gossip and all of the things that can come along with trying to evolve alongside a group of other people that you love and feel loyal to, but you're not always in step with. And I found the way that she did that to be really masterful as well.

45:19You have a great quote, I think, that sums it up as well as anything we talk about here from Lin Dojong. I wanted my children to have the best combination American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix? And I think that's one of the questions of the books. Like, do they not mix? Or can you just, if you can say these are different, let's take the pieces that we want to take. I wonder about that because there's no meta discourse beyond this about, OK, how can we move forward holding both things as possibilities? We want heritage and possibility. We want to be free of social circumscription.

45:57We also want to keep some core values at the same time. There's a conversation we have in my nuclear family here at home about like, what values do we have? How do we express those values? When is it hard? What do we have to give up? what are in conflict with each other. But there's a sense that these two things are oil and water, at least in this particular quotation. But I think the book ultimately ends up in a slightly different place. I don't think it's quite, there's a perfect way to put them together. If you just do it this way, it's all fine and dandy. But I don't think the book ends with the idea that the idea of a Chinese character and American culture are opposites, but they may be more like a yin and a yang, which we get throughout the book in different combinations as well, they are, you know, they each have their trade-offs.

46:44If you take them one particular way, the worst of both intersecting is disastrous. But is there a positive version of that? And I think it's sort of gesturing towards that, Rebecca. Do you have a sense of that?

46:54Jeff:Yeah, I think that there's sort of an underlying hope and faith here that the following generations will do this more effectively. Because they read this book? I mean, not to put too much, but because of representations like this? Yes, and we'll have the conversation. that these women don't get to have with their mothers. Because so much goes unsaid that you can't figure out what the blend is. It's just the mothers saying, I want you to be more Chinese and more obedient. And the American daughters who feel themselves to be American, that is a strong portion of their identity. You want that independence and agency.

47:28Jeff:And there was no template. These people don't have language for it. They are the first generation that they know to move here from China. They find each other as strangers. but as their daughters grow up like one of the things that i thought about a lot was what if there were an update of this where the women who were daughters in this book are the mothers in the next book and we get them and their children and i think we would see more of that blending that's that is i think one of the pieces of hopefulness tan is writing into yeah um my own again to read it again i remember the joy luck club within like the social circle being as more of a hub and like you go out and then sort of come back and maybe that's just reading books that do something similar later.

48:08That's just one of the things that I didn't remember. There's that, I think my favorite scene in the book might be when she's introduced to the Joy Luck Club and she's trying to parse who's who and the relationship. And they've gone from gambling to buying stocks. And it's like, it's almost like the first scene in The Godfather where you see there's this shadow government or shadow like social system set up for people who don't have the same access to it that others in American culture do at the time, but they found a way. And because of the, I don't want to be grandiose here, but because of American social structure, there's some room to maneuver in a different way.

48:42It's not totally free. Don't get me wrong. There's all kinds of biases and things going on. But they found and created a pocket within this larger American culture in which they can forge for themselves a new kind of relationship. Because you say it's not a church. It's not a business. It has rules, weirdly. It has, like, bylaws for what you can and can't do. There's money involved. But I found it's just an interesting and fascinating way to be in community with other people. That's not just potluck dinners, but it also isn't sort of your HOA board. Sort of somewhere between the two of them.

49:14Jeff:Literally invested in each other's lives. Yes. Yes. I said before, it's not afraid to let the readers do the work of remembering names and dynamics and timelines. That feels to be quite modern. Contemporary still, it comes out of, I mean, Morrison is doing something similar. It's not quite as difficult as some of the things, but like not spoon feeding you, okay, this person is this person's daughter and we're going to use an Americanized name because it's easier to remember. Right. To put it all out there. Like it's deeply feminist. And I think one of the reasons that it's so successful in being as feminist and sort of like underlyingly political as it is, is that Tan is so good at showing that she doesn't ever have to say.

49:53Jeff:She's so good at showing us how unvalued these women are, especially in China, and how that impacted them, and then what that means for what they want for their daughters, and how their daughters struggle in their own careers and their own relationships with men to figure out their own identities and express their worth. and their mothers are like pushing them and advocating in their own way for know your worth, be able to be independent, be successful. You can be a prodigy, all of that stuff. But like nobody has a conversation about feminism. Nobody has a conversation about you're a girl and you can do things.

50:31Jeff:And it's so much better for girls in America than it was in China. And I think that if Tan wrote more of that on the page, Like maybe it sells to a slightly more mainstream audience, but it does not have the literary impact and the enduring legacy that it has this way. Yeah, because certainly the mothers don't have they don't have access to first wave or second wave feminism. They have no they have no interest or not interest. They just they just know what it is. And the daughters, I should say here, are a little bit older than sometimes you get in these kinds of representations. Sometimes you get people in the early to mid 20s.

51:05These daughters are grown, like grown, grown. They've had multiple husbands and multiple careers. They've lived away. I think that's interesting to think about, too, that these the readers of this book, you know, as we know, in America, at least, it's sort of 40 year old white women are the core of the book club, commercial fiction, reading population. You think about who the 40-year-old women were in 1989. They were college students in the 60s, right? So they were the first of this sort of post-60s generation to think differently about some of these issues. The work continues. But the readers maybe had more language than the mothers did to understand and see what was happening and think through those terms.

51:43I remember and I think maybe I did read it for a class because I remember there was some criticism of the betrayal of Chinese and Chinese American men. But in this and I don't remember just that, like, they're all terrible and they're doing terrible things for representations of men in these cultures. And they're not really bad here. There's one bad one for sure. But they're more are felt as be gone, absent or detached. They're more absences than presences. Again, there is one notable exception that I don't want to glide over. But, you know, like most of these kinds of criticisms, it really is missing the point.

52:16So that's something that I was struck again by. It's hard to even remember the male characters, again, say for one. And that, I think, is part of what Tan is doing. And I think that's an interesting investigation is how, you know, June's own father is going through a decline and he's a widower. And he is then defined by his wife's absence as much as his own presence. So anyway, and I said the very spare language. You're not going to be pulling out a lot of beautiful sentences necessarily. I didn't find myself struck by particular turns of phrase. This is not meant as a backhanded compliment or something else.

52:56Hemingway and others do similar things. There is a time and place for this. and first novels often are more like this. I think Tan is trying to be so attuned to the interpersonal dynamics that saying it pretty straight gets the job done. It's direct but indirect, if that makes sense. And depth of feeling is generally more sensed than shown. And I think you can do that by not gilding the lily, not adding the adjective, not earning the turn of phrase. you can almost feel some of the sentences are meant to sort of linger for a moment, which I think is really fascinating. Stray thoughts, Rebecca?

53:37Jeff:Let's see. Stray thoughts. Oh, I lost my notes. I'll go. You can go. Okay. If this is structured like a novel, I kept thinking about Pachinko because Pachinko is one of my personal favorites. It has a lot of, again, it's about different cultures. It's Korea, Japan, and America. But you get multi-generational and you get into sort of pre-modern Korean culture all the way up through 80s and 90s American culture. And so it's bridging multiple gaps. So it's swimming in similar waters, I'm trying to say. But it is not totally straightforward, but it's more of a coherent, singular narrative where you have, it's more of a family epic, I guess what I'm trying to say.

54:26Yeah, I mean, it is epic. It's like 600 pages long. Yeah, well, this could be epic where you start like the grandmothers in like 1918. Like we get those bits and pieces. If you go kind of more that direction, is it as successful? That's not rhetorical. I wonder, because I think you're right. There's a strength of it. But then, you know, the big family drama has its own weight. I just found that was just a straight thought. I don't have an answer.

54:49Jeff:It's a good question. And I don't think you can separate those two books from the timelines and the cultures that they came out into. That if Amy Tan had submitted a 600-page novel about Chinese-American mothers and daughters in 1987, I don't think this happens. But that it's taught, that it's pretty direct, that you don't need to – like the history that surrounds it is not intimidating. You don't need to do – I mean, you couldn't Google when the book came out. In Japan stuff is much more complicated. Yeah, but that Amy Tan had sold so well certainly opens the door for writers like Min Jin Lee to come in and to tell multi-generational stories about Asian and Asian American experiences.

55:34Jeff:And to know that you can point to a history of readership for those. I think it's a similar kind of reader that's drawn to the Joy Luck Club and to Pachinko. But you can't do, I don't think you can get to Pachinko without the Joy Luck Club first. No. Another stray thought. It has a lot less, very, very little actually about American racism. There's some like very small moments. But I was ready for it to be much more about how difficult it was to be a Chinese immigrant in the U.S. in like the 50s and 60s than it was. Like they certainly had their difficulties. these. But the presence of white American racism is not the boogeyman here, though I'm sure it was in these people's real lives.

56:19That's not the point of this book. That's not what she's interested in.

56:22Jeff:It's much more about gender. It's much more about what it is to be a woman. Much more about gender. Absolutely. I think I said mine already. It was just that this is a really, it's a good stealthy gateway drug for the book club crowd. And I think the life of this book is totally different if the publisher doesn't glom onto, let's call it a novel. If you market this as a collection of short stories, it's probably closer to the lifespan that Amy Tan expected it to have. And that's not to say anything about its quality, just that marketing short stories is real tough. Marketing and packaging can matter.

56:55There's a fractured element to this. I kept thinking about the end where there's this moment that I'm seeing as hopeful. It's not a full reconciliation. It's not a healing. But these children of a mother who had to do extraordinary things for her and them to survive, who is now gone, come together and take a picture of themselves with a Polaroid. And they see in them together a portrait of their mother. Right. Very moving. Very beautiful. Nice use of the Polaroid camera. And what kind of reconciliation in that? And I think Tan, I see Tan not trying to speak for prior generations, but she is trying to see them.

57:36I think the fractured nature of her understanding, she is reckoning with the fact that that's as well as she can do to see them in pieces, to see them as parts of a whole. But she's never going to grok to use Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strangeland. I guess there's another one we should get to eventually someday. she is coming to terms with the gap between who they are and what she understands them to be and that can still be positive and generative but it's real um and i think an extended first person portrait of say you know if tan wrote auto fiction of her mother like wrote along that same epic i was just asking about from her mother's point of view as the fulcrum character I think that doesn't capture part of the brokenness that Tan is trying to capture.

58:27She is not saying there's a place of total healing, but brokenness is a part of it. But what's possible after you realize that? That's fascinating to me. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney+. Let's go! Get ready for a new case. We're the greatest partners of all time! New friends. Gary the snake. And your last name? The snake. Dream team. The new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2, now available on Disney Plus Rated PG. And right now you can get Disney Plus and Hulu for just$4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer ends March 24th.

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59:41Jeff:Big news for your kid's lunchbox. Welch's fruit snacks are now made without any artificial dyes. A snack parents can feel good about and the same delicious taste kids can't get enough of. All made with no artificial dyes. Try Welch's fruit snacks today. Quotes. I have a bunch, as always. Why don't you lead off with some that you want to get into the air? One of the mothers saying, all these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly, now my daughter does not see me. And I want to tell her this. We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

1:00:23Jeff:And that's kind of the thesis statement for the whole book, I think. Well, especially when you think of the world of the women in China, they are very subscribed to what they're allowed to do and not to. But we get several scenes of where they find agency within those cages. and part of it is to misrepresent their own desires and beings. And the thing especially when she makes up this dream to try to get out of her marriage. Oh, yeah. Right. And so she lies about what the dream is because she needs to have agency. But part and parcel of all that is a kind of deception. And they learn, and this comes through in the extended chess metaphor, which you have some nice words about to say in a minute, which is a lot of it is about feints and not saying what you actually want in what you actually think so that you're not held to it and people can't use it to against you.

1:01:10Well, that's a survival technique. And it turns out when you're trying to have real, open, honest relationship with people, that is not a way forward, Rebecca. That is not going to help you get to the next place. The thing that got you here is not going to help you in the next place. And I think that's something that the mother's generation starts to see. They don't know what's next necessarily, but they're starting to articulate it in these moments of like, ah, yes, there's something going on here that's a consequence of how I behave and how I've operated.

1:01:38Jeff:Right. Yeah, they're just starting to crack it open. In one of the fables, this is said, then you must teach my daughter the same lesson, how to lose your innocence but not your hope. That's quite beautiful. Yeah, that's, and also a thesis statement of the book. That is definitely what the mothers have sought to do. Like, they lost their innocence outside of their own choices. They didn't have agency over the things that happened to them. But they have retained hope. They have moved across the world. They have started families. They have created a community all out of a deep desire and belief that they can give their daughters something else.

1:02:16That is really well spotted, actually. It's gorgeous. Because one thing that feels more apparent in Tan's biography, her and her mother's real lives, that doesn't appear here is a sense of despair. Like it feels like there were moments of real despair in Tan's life and her mother's life. And how could there not be? Even in the you got to leave your kid by the road scene. That is it's not it's not portrayed. Maybe you disagree as being despair, but of like just tactical. Like this is the this is the best thing I can do in this moment. And to make that move is about the possibility that it might work.

1:02:50It might actually work to pin some money to my kids and leave them there. And you know what? God damn it. It did. It did. But in Tan's own sort of biography and interviews, and especially how she talked about her mother's difficulty, it feels like there was more despair there. And that just wasn't included. Yeah.

1:03:05Jeff:And it's not that those experiences are without consequences for these women. No, no, no, no. Yeah, like we see one who's lost a child. We see that she has like deep depressions and can't really function or engage in her family life. We see little bits of it with all of the mothers, how they suffer in the present day because of the suffering that they experienced in the past. But that hope lays underneath of all of their choices and continues to guide their behavior. And they can't quite express that to their daughters, that it's hopefulness and their daughters haven't experienced it as their mother's hope.

1:03:40Jeff:They've experienced it as pressure. And I think that's the central tension of the story is the mothers are saying, I did all of this because I saw this possibility for you. And I saw this hope that you could have a better life. And the daughters are pushing back on all you ever did was pressure me to play chess more or to be a piano prodigy or whatever it was. And they don't understand where it came from, that the kernel of that is this hope and this belief. Also, like, why did I push my children in a wheelbarrow? Why did I leave them by the side of the road if not for you to have something better?

1:04:13Jeff:So you're like, by God, you better go on and have something better. Right. Yeah. And this is kind of connects a couple of things we just said. This is another quote. She learned these things, but I couldn't teach her about Chinese character. How to obey parents and listen to your mother's mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, but never flash it around like a cheap ring. why Chinese thinking is best. And that how you can take advantage of cheap opportunities, this is wonderful sort of Machiavellian advice for the culture in which they, in the society in which they operate.

1:04:49But in the society in which their daughters find themselves, again, there are limitations in glass ceilings and biases and prejudice, but the opportunities are more, you can go to college and you can become an architect and you can do these sorts of things and they have their own, they have their own things you have to navigate, but it's not about, you know, waiting in the weeds so you can jump out or leave or run away at a particular time.

1:05:10Jeff:And one of their husbands, even part of the reason he leaves her is that she won't express what she wants. She's been constantly, one of the daughters just constantly defers to him for what do you want for dinner? Where do you want to go on vacation? How do you want our lives to be? And at a certain point, he just can't take it anymore. Like, you tell me. You make a choice. What do you want? That that subjugation of your own desires that helped the mother survive is a costly strategy for the daughters. Mm-hmm. there's one metaphor that I caught and I can't quite parse it so I'll just put it here all of us are like stairs one step after another going up and down but all going the same way but if someone's going the other way on stairs they're literally going the opposite way but the stairway connects the same two things I'm not trying to say it's a bad metaphor I'm trying to get my understanding of it as poor but there's a I guess it does connect a shared space, but they're at cross purposes somehow.

1:06:11That even if they're on the same stairs, is it meaningfully different to go up and down?

1:06:14Jeff:Yeah. I mean, it feels Escher-esque. Kind of those Escher staircases where you can be on it, but like one of you is upside down and seeing things from a different perspective. A lot of chess metaphors happening. A lot of chess metaphors, yes. And one of the daughters is a chess champion who overtly talks about having to play against her mother, navigate her relationship with her mother strategically like it's a game of chess. There's a lot of that. What do you have going on here with the piano? Well, that's what literature's metaphor I had. You already had chess, which is probably the best one.

1:06:46The piano, right, is like you can be a genius. We're going to buy you this piano and we're going to make you love it. And then you're not going to love it and you're going to rebel against it. But then we're ultimately going to try to give it to you as a gift that you'll honor, but you won't accept, but you will have the piano tuned. I just thought all in that whole... So tingly. The miasma of interpersonal dynamics around that piano are a pretty good encapsulation of the dynamics at play here. And it just sort of sits in the room and everyone knows the dynamics around that piano, even if they can't articulate it in a particular moment.

1:07:21And no one wants to get rid of it. It has value at the same time. Very, very tangly stuff. Rebecca, is the Joy Luck Club for you if?

1:07:29Jeff:If you are into or down to deal with nonlinear structure, if you're interested in a work that opened the door for a lot of writers working today, like, I don't know how fresh this feels to a reader in 2025 because it laid the groundwork for so many future writers. And this is the maybe not if. The mother-daughter shit is heavy. So that's just you got to take your own temperature for... Violence, sexual assault, there's some other heavy dynamics at the same place. Definitely worth Google on the trigger warnings, the details of those, because there is a lot of difficult stuff here. I didn't really know how to put this in maybe for you.

1:08:15We haven't talked about this, but it's minus 324 pages and I flew through it. A very, I always use the word enjoyable. That doesn't feel right, but it was easy and I found myself wanting to keep going. And it was not hard to keep going.

1:08:30Jeff:It's not breezy, but it doesn't feel, this one did not feel like homework to me. Some of the reading we've done for the show has felt like, all right, like saddle up, you know, make sure my dictionary is ready. but you can't let the story wash over you but it doesn't feel very effortful which is also a great trick on tan's part yes and i do think the breaking it up maybe helps with that the sort of chapter you're on to the next and you move around kind of keeps keeps the balls in the air the immortal questions that art asks which of these are primary here what is the good life what do i owe my neighbor how do i know what i know is this all there is how to deal with the certainty of death?

1:09:06What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil? I think if we think of what do I owe my neighbor as being ethics writ large, that's probably the premise. How do I be with my family? How do I be with the people?

1:09:18Jeff:And what is the good life? Their mothers have come in search of a certain kind of good life. The daughters are defining the good life in a different way for themselves. Are those things in competition with each other or is one an evolution of the other? I think that is a fundamental question here. Yeah. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing i'm not totally sure on the first so on the first i mean it doesn't feel like it's about art and writing there's not writers in well there are writers copywriters ad writers but there are these fables that open the story and it's about storytelling or like the consequences maybe i was gonna go stories and storytelling yeah yep yep yep uh but this is also a debut novel tan had not been writing for very long when she wrote this so she i don't think she had been stewing in like yeah i don't think she has a lot of takes on writing as she was getting this one right the door fascinating um there is a signal adaptation uh could you get the most of the gist most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation yeah i watched it last night and it feels like an early 90s oliver stone movie like a big movie for grown-ups um which i miss this kind of movie.

1:10:28Jeff:So like that was one thing. You can definitely get the gist. They make some changes to the structure, but you get the heart of the story. The cultural depictions feel a little dated now. And if characters were written this way in 2025, we might talk about them as being insensitive or stereotypical, which I think is an indication that stories like Joy Luck Club expanded the conversation about Chinese American women, about Asian immigrants in general, and have continued to push so that depictions have become even more textured and nuanced. But it feels like it's 35 years old. And I don't think that's bad.

1:11:11Jeff:It was a good two hours and 15 minutes. The book also, though, is so wonderful. Don't watch the movie instead of reading the book. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He went on to direct Blue in the Face, which was a co-director with the author Paul Ostra. I've never heard of that book before. And then he went on a run of sort of making 90s movies. I think anywhere but here and The Center of the World. Wait, this wasn't directed by Oliver Stone, was it? He produced it. Oh, produced it. The director was Wayne Wang, so a different person. But then who directed Made in Manhattan a little bit later for you rom-com fans, which I didn't know until I looked this up.

1:11:50The budget was$10.5 million and it tripled the budget, as you said before. But I don't think we talked about the budget. It did great.

1:11:56Jeff:That's a real box office win. Yeah. I didn't really watch. I do remember it. I have seen it. I remember it being a fairly distant version at the time. But I always am going to say with this, this story, like many others, feelings are in feelings and books are best for feelings. They just are. Books are better for feelings. I don't think I'd do another adaptation of this over more modern stories. That's where I landed on movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets. Though I think someone could take a crack at a musical because there would be interesting scenes. That's interesting. I didn't spend much time thinking about it as a musical.

1:12:30Jeff:I agree with you here. I would not advocate for a remake of Joy Luck Club over some more contemporary stories. If they were going to do it, I would want to see a series about the later generations, continuing this evolution of these women's stories. Miscellaneous trivia, adaptation rumors, misattributive quotes, etc. We've talked about some of these. I picked up the—here's the two most popular quotes on Goodreads. I like to go do this. Okay, let's hear it. The first, the most popular, by a factor of like three. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson, how to lose your innocence but not your hope, how to laugh forever.

1:13:04Jeff:Ah, same thing we talked about. Yeah. All right. Glad to know that's the most popular one. And the second one isn't hate merely the result of wounded love. OK, shocking that that's not the most popular one. Yeah, because that's the one that feels complicated, but it's actually no, not is not really that. Yeah. By the way, no, no, it's not. This was we mentioned Louise Erdrich at the top, but. Yes. Amy Tan was inspired by the format of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. And so I guess in your read-alikes, those books are kind of nothing alike. But if you're just curious about the starting threads of things, you could go pick up Love Medicine.

1:13:39Jeff:I think what happens to this book if it's marketed as short stories is just a wild alternate universe. Right. In the form of relative popularity, it's about six times as popular as her next most popular book, which are The Bonesetter Star. Again, if you're using Goodreads ratings as a proxy, it's the worst we have except for all the others. Like when you start at the top of the mountain with your debut like this. It's true. Yeah, it's incredible. It's tough. Hot takes. You did some. You want to do it? I've got one more that I haven't said. Yeah, let's hear yours already. Is Amy Tan responsible for the ex-female job title, the ex's job title formulation?

1:14:12So the Bonesetter's daughter, even to the point where Wonder Boy sort of parodies in the arsonist's daughter. We get so many of these that becomes a joke later. And I don't know. She does two of them.

1:14:26Jeff:Yeah. And then we like decades later, we get The Tiger's Wife by Atea Obrecht, like launches another round of them. And now it's gone because you can't name your thing that because everyone thinks it's a it's a cliche to. But anyway, I just come back around. It'll come back around. Yeah. It's not a high tip, but the title works. I think the title does a lot of work to get people interested and help them remember it. If the book wasn't good, it wouldn't matter. but that the title works and is memorable is, I think it's hard to underrate in your trying to figure out what's going to happen to a book.

1:14:58Jeff:It sounds like it's going to be a pleasant read, The Joy Love Club. Yeah, yeah. Read-alikes, I have, I said Pachinko, and then I think the more literary, award-winning version of this we get 11 years later as Interpreter of Maladies by Chopra Wahiri, a book with one of our shared favorites of all time. And then really to go to a more modern one, kind of like you were saying, Everything I Never Told You or Celeste Ng. You could go to many of her books. And I think those are all in their own ways progeny of the Joy Luck Club. Yeah. For like more classic book club types of fiction, a little more contemporary, Jamie Ford has made a career on this.

1:15:37Jeff:The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is his debut novel, but he's written several more. Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese is a graphic novel. That's a great pick. That's wonderful. Right, about these kinds of multi-generational experiences and stories. And then my Jhumpa Lahiri pick was the namesake for multi-generational immigrant family story. But Interpreter of Maladies is my Jhumpa Lahiri goat. That's just because it's short stories, right? Yeah. If we're arguing about which is a short story versus which is a novel. A lot of directions to go if you like the Joy Luck Club. And of course, you can pick up Amy Tan's other work.

1:16:09Cocktail Party Crib Sheet, Rebecca. I think you best articulated most of these already. Do you want to take another? Let's sum up and get them into a memeable form.

1:16:17Jeff:Just fundamentally about the complexity of mother-daughter relationships and the tension between rejecting your mother's perspective, seeking independence, and realizing and appreciating your mother's wisdom on the other side of that tension. And that what looks like rigidity and adherence to old-fashioned ways of being can actually be a manifestation of deep and unexpressible love. Unexpressible and unexpressed. That the children can never fully appreciate and understand the sacrifices that their parents made for them. Just because you just cannot embody that experience your parents had. But especially the depth and difficulty of the things that the mothers go through here.

1:16:58Jeff:But I think if you're looking for one soundbite nugget for this book, it's that motherhood and immigration are both acts of great hope that bring with them great fear and anxiety and great love. So how do you hold the hope and not be sunk by the fear? Yeah, not be subject to it at the same time. I think that's the trickiest part. Our final beat, our zero to well-read score, each one gets a score from one to ten, with ten being the highest. our five categories are historical importance readability current relevance of central questions book nerd read cred and oh damn factor interesting these are all when we get to these at the end i'm like oh this is an interesting one have i ever said ah this is straightforward and not not at all interesting uh historical importance i've said a lot about the modern version of this um in terms of a lot of what's happened in the last 30 to 40 years of contemporary American literature feels like it flows through, at least in part, the Joy Luck Club.

1:17:52So I have a hard time saying less than six.

1:17:55Jeff:Yeah, I would give it a six or a seven. Yeah, okay. Readability, nine? Yeah, it's super readable. Yeah. It would only be a 10 if it was like funnier or there's less difficult things. Readability is really about how quickly your eyes want to move over the words for me. Maybe if I use that, maybe it's more of an eight because it's not, you know, genre. The fables do complicate it a little bit. Yeah. And there's hard things. There's hard things. And it's sometimes difficult to keep straight what timeline you're on, what relationship you're in, and what happened when you returned to that relationship 70 pages later.

1:18:28Jeff:I drew myself a family tree with notes about whose mother had which background experience. Current relevance of central questions. I mean, it's never all current, but it never goes away, these questions. Right. Kind of a 10. Yeah. Yeah. We can go with nine. Sure. Book nerd read cred. I have no sense of this. I think it's underrated today because so many other books stand on its shoulders. If it's underrated, it would mean people would not give you credit for reading it. So that means it would be low. It's low. Yeah. Versus what it should be is, I guess, the tension we find ourselves navigating.

1:19:00It should be high.

1:19:01Jeff:Yeah. I think it's probably like a four or a five. Yeah. Yeah. Five. Oh, damn factor. This is that unexpressible je ne sais quoi that tries to capture our experience of like being surprised or wowed by the book or major pieces of it. It's sneakier when I think as any given moment, I'm less wowed. But as I think about the totality and that final image and some of the scenes and how it's structured, I have a great I have a great appreciation for the larger design of how this is put together. And I've read a lot of books about the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. All right. Talk about that.

1:19:41So how much Odin? Yeah. Is this as good as it gets?

1:19:45Jeff:This is about as good as it gets, especially because no one is sitting around at lunch being like, if only my mom and I could understand each other.

1:19:58Jeff:if only my daughter knew that tan just she i've said it already but that she shows so much more than she tells and she does it so well and then that this is someone's debut novel and not a debut after like 30 years of trying to get published a debut after writing at all for like three years all right number it give quantify everything you just said into a single digit, Rebecca. Come on. Eight. Not going to fight you. Great. We are going to stick around for those of you who subscribe to the office hours level of our Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com slash zero to well read to things we didn't get to, additional quotes, stray matter.

1:20:40You can follow us on the socials, zero to well read podcasts, Instagram, TikTok, those kinds of places. Shoot us an email zero to well read at book riot dot com. Thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring. Again, this season of Zero to Well Read, go to thriftbooks.com. I bet you can find some interesting editions. There's a 30th anniversary edition that has an introduction by Amy Tan. If you're going to go get one, get that one.

1:21:05Jeff:Get that one. Yeah, it's good. And finally, Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much.

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