"The Joy Luck Club"
                           A film review by
                          Linda Lopez McAlister
                          on "The Women's Show"
                        WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                           October 2, 1993

    "The Joy Luck Club" which opened yesterday across the country is probably
the most intense and multifaceted exploration of the bonds between mothers and
daughters that has ever been put on film. It is, of course, the film version,
directed by Wayne Wang, of Amy Tan's bestseller _The Joy Luck Club_ with a
screenplay written by Amy Tan and Ronald Bass. It is an impressive work of
filmmaking on a large scale, painting the lives of eight women across two
generations and in two cultures. The Joy Luck Club is four apparently
affluent women from China, now in their sixties and living in San Francisco,
who have gotten together on a weekly basis to play mah jong for forty some
years. At the opening of the film one of them, Suyuan (Kieu Chihn), has died
and her daughter June (Ming-Na Wen) is preparing to go to China to meet her
half sisters, abandoned there by their mother during World War II. The film
progresses in a number of flashbacks about the lives of these women, Auntie
Lindo (Tsai Chin), Auntie Ying Ying (France Nyugen) and Auntie An Mei (Lisa Lu)
and their daughters Waverly (Tamlyn Tomita), Rose (Rosaline Chao) and Lena
(Lauren Tom).  Many of the scenes from the mothers' lives take place
in China before they came to the United States and give a picture of the
lives that women in pre-war and wartime China endured including arranged
marriages, intense misogyny and violence toward women, family ostracism, and
social stratification even within the household among the various wives.
One way or another these women left their lives in China to make
new ones and raise new families in America but in another sense they are not
able to leave those experiences behind and they color the hopes and expectations
these women have for their daughters growing up in America.

    Many of the China sequences were filmed on location and particularly
there Director Wayne Wang creates visual images that are of
astounding beauty and sometimes of almost unbearable horror. Indelibly etched
in your mind will be the image of the sweet, fat, adorable baby boy
whose mother drowns him in his bath--because that is the only power she has
to hurt the sadistic husband who has tortured and humiliated her. Or the
scene in which one of these women, despised by her family, still returns
and literally cuts off a piece of her own flesh to make a life-giving soup
for her dying mother.

   Their daughters, young Chinese American women growing up in California,
would seem to have an easier life, but what the film makes so clear is the
interaction between the mothers' lives and those of the daughters. The
intense pressures the mothers put on their daughters to succeed, the
competition this fosters between them, the racism they face within the
caucasian community, the pull between what is expected of them as Chinese women
and American women, the difficulty of shaking the internalized notion that
women must swallow their suffering and pain, that they must bury their
desires and their voices and defer to those of their men--all of these things
are part of the struggles the daughters face as their mothers' daughters, 
pursuing careers, marriages and relationships both within and outside the
Chinese American community.

   I kept thinking, as I watched this film, of Adrienne Rich's "Of Mother
Born" for it is a long a moving illustration of the unbreakable, often
painful, sometimes, however, affirming and empowering bond between mothers
and daughters. And though these mothers and daughters are specifically
Chinese, the theme is universal and speaks to every woman who ever had a
mother and/or a daughter, across ethnic and racial differences.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.

   Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not
reprint this review without the permission of the author.