The Joy Luck Club

"What was worse, we asked ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness? So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy.
And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck."

Revised Fall 2007 Reading Schedule

By this date...	...have finished:
Thursday, 30 August	Part I, to page 85
Monday, 10 September	Part II, to page 156
Tuesday, 18 September	Part III, to page 237
Monday, 24 September	Part IV, end of the novel

From the Roots Web Penny Postcard page--http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/special/ppcs/ppcs.html

Class Handouts:

Here are the Joy Luck Club family trees, which should be a help on your written test.
To practice for the test, you can write commentaries on these sample selections from the book.

Internet Resources:

You may be tempted to read an online summary or notes (such as the ones at Book Rags, SparkNotes, aeNotes, CliffsNotes, etc.) instead of the actual book. But beware! If I'm linking to them here, I must have read them! And you won't be able to get away with reading them instead of the book. It also happens to be a fine book you'll enjoy much more than any summary, if you give it a chance.
You also might think you can just watch the movie instead of reading the book (here's a glowing review from Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times), but I've seen it, and I'll avoid letting you use it as a substitute for reading the book. It's quite different, in major ways, from the novel. We'll watch some of the film in class.
Much of the initial background of the novel involves Chinese history, and an invasion by "the Japanese" and words like "Kuomintang". If you'd like some more information on what's happening politically in the novel, there are some sites that help. Winston Blackburn's "China in Revolution" is a personal site with a quick overview of the period, 1911-1949. Chinavoc is a site that sells items from China, but they also present a more detailed set of pages on the revolutionary period in Chinese history.
For a different look at the Communist Revolution, take a look at Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages, and see some of the ideals and ideas of the revolution in colorful propagandistic glory.
A high school student, Tania Rojas Esponda, won a contest for her essay about the adaptation of Joy Luck Club into a movie. Her essay argues for "the recognition of adaptation as an art form," and makes some good observations about the film and the book.
What is this game mah jong they play in the novel? You may be familiar with the electronic version. The Mah Jongg website has some short articles on the history and symbolism of the game. A more complete history and a good, quick overview of the rules, can be found at the Mah Jong Museum site.

The Academy of Achievement ("A Museum of Living History") has a nice, short biography of the author, Amy Tan. They also have quite a nice interview--be sure to click on the video parts, if you have QuickTime on your computer, and hear her talk about the essay she wrote in the third grade about her local library, her first published piece of writing. It's a long interview (several pages to click on), but worth reading, because it covers a lot of her biography and ideas very well. You'll also learn about things from The Joy Luck Club that are based on her own life and members of her family.
Amy Tan's own website has a section on "myths and legends" about her, a biography, and a Q & A about her latest novel.
Lastly, Salon.com's 1995 interview with Tan is also quite a good one.

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