Amy-Tan及The-Joy-Luck-Club.doc

Amy Tan
Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. Her most well-known work is The Joy Luck Club, which has been translated into 35 languages. In 1993, the book was adapted into a commercially successful film.
Tan has written several other bestselling novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter and Saving Fish From Drowning. She also wrote a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. Her most recent novel Saving Fish From Drowning explores the tribulations experienced by a group of people who disappear while on an art expedition in the jungles of Burma. In addition to these, Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series which aired on PBS. She also appeared on PBS in short spot encouraging children to write
Novels:
The Joy Luck Club (1989)
The Kitchen God's Wife (1991)
The Hundred Secret Senses (1995)
Two Kinds (2000)
The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001)
Saving Fish from Drowning (2005)
Awards：
Finalist National Book Award
Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize
Bay Area Book Reviewers Award
Commonwealth Gold Award
American Library Association's Notable Books
American Library Association's Best Book for Young Adults
Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature Honorable Mention
Selected for the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read
New York Times Notable Book
Booklist Editors Choice
Finalist for the Orange Prize
Nominated for the Orange Prize
Nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Audie Award: Best Non-fiction, Abridged
Parents' Choice Award, Best Television Program for Children
Shortlisted British Academy of Film and Television Arts award, best screenplay adaptation
Shortlisted WGA Award, best screenplay adaptation
Academy of Achievement, Golden Plate Award

Synopsis of “The Joy Luck Club”
Theme：
The challenge of cultural translation;
Storytelling as a means of self-assertion and communication;
The inescapable duality of immigrant identity.
Contest：
The novel depicts the four characters, destiny of different Chinese women give for refugees, emigrated to the United States, as well as their birth, growth in the United States of America daughter life experience. As a first generation immigrant mothers have been in a foreign country, but still go out and out of Chinese women, family feud can behind, but can not give up and the blood ties. In the United States was born daughters, although looks very similar with the mother, but grew up in quite different from the Chinese native values and the environment, and had to personally take two kinds of culture and values of the collision. Both deep and persistent kinship between mother and daughter, also has a feel helpless diaphragm resentment, not only care about each other and mutual hurt ... ... However, beyond all is the common Chinese mother, blood is thicker than water and affectionate.

In the first section, the first story is narrated by June. Since her mother has died, June is asked to take her mother’s place in the Joy Luck Club, which her mother started forty years ago. The club is a kind of gathering in which four women play mahjong, eat, and tell stories, which they believe may offer them great joy and bring them good luck. Her mother’s friends persuade June to travel to China to find her two half-sisters, children that Suyuan was forced to leave behind in China when she escaped during Japan’s invasion of Kweilin in World War II. But June is not willing to make the journey because she feels unable to tell her mother’s stories to her half-sisters. Her mother’s friends feel that their daughters, like June, may not understand their own stories. In the next three narratives of the first section, the mothers, Lindo Jong, An-mei Hsu, and Ying-ying St. Clair, relate stories about their own mothers and their relationship with them, which begins a collection of stories spanning three generations.
In the middle two sections, the daughters tell the stories of their memories and relationships with their mothers. In general, mothers want their daughters to realize the American dream without forgetting their cultural heritage; while daughters struggle with their dual cultural identities. As a child, Waverly is a chess champion, but her mother brags about her all the time and thus pushes her to a breakdown. Suyuan wants June to become a child prodigy and forces her to take piano lessons. The daughters’ feeling that they could never live up to their mothers’ expectations continue in their adulthood. When Lena has renovated her house, Ying-ying points out the flaws in the house rather than recognizing the artistic merits.
In the fourth section, the mothers narrate how they struggle to help their daughters overcome the obstacles in their lives to find happiness. An-mei tells how Rose refuses to speak up for herself when confronted with a divorce with Ted. An-mei relates a story about her own mother, a concubine who chooses to suffer silently at first and commits suicide later when she feels the pain is too much to bear. Through narrating her mother’s story to her daughter, An-mei wants to tell Rose that one can make a choice between controlling one’s own life and suffering silently. Rose is finally empowered to stand up to Ted.
The Joy Luck Club explores the relationship between mothers and daughters, describing them from misunderstanding to reconciliation. Although the four immigrant women live in America for a long time, they remain more Chinese than they are American. They are worried that their daughters, now growing up to adulthood, know little about their mothers or their mothers’ homeland, and thus they will have nothing of the ancestral culture to pass on their children. Their daughters are noticeably more American than Chinese despite their Asian features. They yearn for Americanization and repudiate much of the Chinese heritage. However, at the end of The Joy Luck Club, June narrated her trip to China. By meeting her half sisters she comes to understand her mother and her mother’s culture in a way she could not have done before: “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.” June reconciles Sycuan’s two lives, two cultures, and two countries, which gives her mother’s friends the hope that they, too, will be reconciled with their daughters. In addition to exploring relationships between mothers and daughters, The Joy Luck Club addresses male-female relationships from a feminist viewpoint, for instance, Lindo escaped from an arranged marriage in which she was unable to make choices for herself.
The Joy Luck Club received many favorable reviews. It was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Best Fiction, the Commonwealth Club Gold Award, and the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults Award. It remained on The New York Times hardcover best-seller list for nine months and sold more than four million copies. It has been translated into 35 languages.

Key elements of a novel
The novel has three elements: characters, the plot, the environment (natural environment and social environment).
Setting: the where and when of the story or novel
Character: who
Conflict: the what (what is the problem)
Plot: the how (how is the conflict developed and resolver)
Theme: the why