The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is a novel by the American writer Amy Tan, published in 1989. It is about four Chinese immigrant families in San Francisco and about the club they start there.

The four mothers came to the United States in the years around 1949, and they meet weekly to play mahjong and to tell one another the stories of what they left behind in China. They call themselves the Joy Luck Club, and what holds them together is loss and hope for their daughters.

The daughters have grown up in America and have not heard most of those stories. They think their mothers' advice is out of date, and their mothers think their daughters do not understand what they were saved from.

The novel is arranged the way a mahjong game is, in four parts of four sections each, and the stories are told by the mothers and daughters in turn. Three mothers and four daughters speak; the fourth mother, Suyuan Woo, has died before the book opens. It was adapted into a film in 1993.