I recognized that child, only now that child was no longer alone. But when I neared writing the end, I was intuitively guided to a childhood memory of me lying in bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling, scared and utterly alone. When I wrote that story, I did not start off with this understanding in place. Her seeming lack of motherly pride and love renders the girl powerless, unsure of herself and her future. In response, her mother falls silent and treats her daughter as if she does not exist. “Rules of the Game,” for example, is not about a chess player per se it is about a rebellious child, who one day decides to assert her own power by rebuking her mother. I could go on with a disputation of facts like these, but there is a deeper truth in fiction that is absolutely true to my life. Although I was surrounded by family friends who belonged to a social group known as The Joy Luck Club, I lived in mixed neighborhoods in Oakland, and later in white suburbia. Because I had written a story about a chess prodigy, a chess magazine invited me to write an article on the end game. I have had only dogs, and I am a failure at house-training them. Interviewers have asked what important lessons I have taught my daughter. I have been continuously married to the same guy since 1974. One woman at a reading told me that she divorced her husband for the same reason I divorced mine. Most readers, I suspect, believe the stories are thinly disguised memoir. Who would pay to read that? Over the last 30 years, I continue to be grateful and amazed by the answer: many. The mother, in return, feels her daughter knows nothing about her and has learned nothing from her mother, the one who loved her best. A mother’s advice is received by a daughter as rejection of who she really is. A mother’s hopes and expectations become a daughter’s sense of failure. Their relationships are fraught with years of misunderstandings and accumulated pain. The characters are mothers who immigrated from China and their modern thirty-something American-born daughters. And in those days, books that were non-mainstream were termed “ethnic,” enjoyed by special readers, largely those who were in ethnic studies programs.

In fact, it might do worse.Īfter all, these were quirky stories, written by an unknown Chinese American author. I had heard this was the case with most first novels, and there was no reason to expect mine would fare any better.

Before The Joy Luck Club was published in March 1989, I told my husband that my novel would be on bookstore shelves for about six weeks and then disappear into the shredder. I am a realist, not prone to outlandish dreams, and thus, rarely disappointed.

Critics on amy tan familial bonds