I resurrected the horrifying sound of a neighbor girl screaming as her mother beat her in the bathroom. I used the frayed sofa in one house and snippets of gossip around mahjongg tables during meetings of the real Joy Luck Club. Fiction allows me the freedom to conjure up scenes, add details from my life or my mother’s, alter them-whatever is best for telling a story. That’s how she can change it.”įiction is a portal to a deeper understanding of myself, and when I went through it the first time, I knew I would write fiction the rest of my life. “She can tell people what my mother suffered.
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.
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