The Joy Luck Club

     The first section of The Joy Luck Club presents Jing-Mei "June" Woo, a limited narrator, approaching the challenge of filling in her mother's place at the Joy Luck Club. June questions her "worthiness" as well as her desire to join the meetings. As the story unfolds, June focuses on the memories she has of her recently deceased mother. From her revelations, we see the obvious tension between the two women. June says it the best, "We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more." June struggles with the expectations set out by her mother while her mother strived for the life she was never able to achieve through June. June doesn't fully understand the experiences her mother has lived through. She heard the stories, but says herself that they seemed to be nothing but Chinese fairy tales.

     Through June's memory of her mother's experiences in Kweilin, we see a woman faced with unspeakable tragedy and the human spirit's will power to overcome the experiences of loss, destruction, and war. "It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain...But to despair was to wish back for something already lost." June's mother recalling her creative solutions to overcome the conditions in Kweilin with the Joy Luck Club clearly portrayed the human spirit's will to survive under any circumstances. It reminded me of the formation of African American culture under bondage, the slave dances and songs, and their undeniable need to be free even if they had been born into slavery. Humans are only as free as we allow one another to be. In a more recent example, the Jaycee Dugard interview with Diane Sawyer shows the human spirit in its purest form as well as in its most hideous. Jaycee was able to love and nurture her two children under the most extreme and disgusting situation. She didn't see them as a product of her abuser, she saw an innocent piece of herself in those two babies and sought to protect it. The sheer fact that she was able to face the American public to tell her story shows that she has moved on in a positive direction. June's mother shows this same positive movement in the face of her equally extreme situation through her formation of the Joy Luck Club.