Somehow I wrongly thought Amy Tan’s book had been written 40 or 50 years ago. I didn’t realize my mistake until I came to the part of the book where an American Chinese woman said, “Every family in China has TV, color and remote.” The book must have been written in the late 80s or early 90s, I concluded. ^[1]

And the book now stands in the section of Los Angeles public library shelves where works of classic literature are displayed. It is in the company of such enduring works as The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, and Moby Dick.

I happened to have just begun reading the novel when a middle-aged American-born Mexican said to me, “I read The Joy Luck Club as an introduction to Chinese culture last year.”

The novel well deserves such a compliment. It is probably partly for that reason why The Joy Luck Club is now considered a modern classic in the United States.

Obedience and humility are expected of all Chinese, especially women. There is the Chinese idiom describing this, namely, san-cong-si-de（三从四德）, which means “three obediences and four virtues.” A woman has to obey her father at home, her husband after marriage, and her son after the death of her husband and to display the virtues of morality, proper speech, modest manner, and diligent work.

As a Chinese living in China between 1939 and 2000, I believe that the code of ethics for women basically held true between the time of Confucius (551-479 BC) and 1949, when the Communist Party took over the power. Things have drastically changed since then. Nowadays, Chinese women may not wield much political power which is easy to see, but many women, especially those in the urban areas, hold a lot of power in their own homes. This is especially true in metropolitan Shanghai, where women have become so sophisticated.

As for the status of the Chinese women who immigrate to the US, Amy Tan’s novel gives a wonderful picture of the transition they are undergoing: while the first generation continues to hold on to the traditional code, the second and the later generations are rebelling against it simply because they find it easy to identify themselves with the US code: independent, daring, even aggressive. It’s hard to say which is better; it’s just changes that are unavoidable.

Related to obedience and humility is the concept of going with the tide, not against it or making unnecessary waves. Amy Tan touches upon it on several occasions in her novel. If the idea of obedience and humility is not as popular as it used to be among Chinese, I believe that most Chinese still embraces the concept of going with the tide whole-heartedly. There are many Chinese sayings about the need to do that. A typical one is that “A raft that juts out rots first（出头的椽子先烂）,” which means that those who come to the fore are more liable to be a target of attack. The well-known doctrine of the mean or the golden mean（中庸之道）, in spite of a lot of supporters for a good reason, is taken by many Chinese as a simple warning not to go to the extreme whether in word or in action, or put simply, not to create disturbances. That is in full accord with a central idea of Confucianism, which is to maintain the current order. ^[2] Standing in the middle is best way to avoid misfortune, bad things, or bad luck, whatever you might call it. Or, conservativeness. The rationale is the same.

Readers of The Joy Luck Club are sure to be impressed by one of the four Chinese women’s great expectations of her daughter. The girl was just tall enough for her chin to reach the table when her mother started to cultivate her as a prodigy, first as a chess player, then as an entertainer like Shirley Temple, and then as a piano player. As the girl grew a little older, she began to assert her independence and asked her mom to let her be what she was, not someone she was not. Under these circumstances, clashes broke out between them. Hardly any reader will be able to suppress a smile to read the dialogue between mom and daughter. It was the daughter who won out in the end. That’s as it should be.

The important thing to remember, however, is that, whether in the US or in China or anywhere else, most Chinese parents continue to have high expectations of their sons and daughters and accordingly, exercise lots of pressure on them. This is known in China as “expecting the son to become a dragon and the daughter a phoenix（望子成龙，望女成凤）.” Generally, a Chinese boy or girl, again whether in China or the US, works much harder than their counterparts in the West because after school, they are made to go to a music school to learn to play the piano or to an academy to study some skill or knowledge that is believed to provide the child with a better chance to complete in society. It is no accident that many Chinese American kids grow up to be doctors, dentists, engineers, or other professionals. The more than 2,000-years-old Confucian emphasis on education still plays a big role today. The same is largely true of Japan and Korea, in both of which Confucian ideas prevail.

Another thing that will deeply impress the readers about the novel is the superstition or blind faith prevalent among the first generation of women immigrants from China. That, I believe, is closely connected with the women’s status in society and at home as I have discussed. Unable to be their own masters, most women could only attribute what happened to them in their life to fate（命运）, or luck（缘份）. The surprise here is that some of them were able to connect the dots and explain almost everything, big (the early death of a child, for instance) and small (the appearance of an owl, for instance), that happened in their life in a seemingly logical way. To explain, one will probably have to look at the prevalence of Buddhism in China, part of whose teaching is the transmigration of life and death (生死轮回). Basically, it says that doing good (for instance, a woman being obedient) in this life will reap benefits for the next ^[4], which means that one is not going to turn into a turtle or a pig or some other beast ^[5] in the next life, but instead to be born into a good family and to rise in social and economic status.