Very few films make a major, enduring cultural impact in their first year of release — let alone 30 years later. But there has always been something special and powerful about The Joy Luck Club, released on September 8, 1993. The film tells the interwoven stories of four older women — longtime friends who bond over their shared experiences emigrating from China — and of their four Chinese American daughters who have to navigate two very different worlds.
The film’s existence was not a given, even though it was based on a best-selling novel and the screenplay was co-written by the book’s author, Amy Tan. During the ’90s, there was a dearth of mainstream films that told Asian American stories without resorting to stereotypes. Thankfully, the stars aligned, and the film was spearheaded into production in great part due to the fierce vision of director Wayne Wang.
The resulting film was a beloved hit, earned excellent reviews, and became a cultural touchstone that still echoes to this day. (For its 25th anniversary, for example, several Asian American writers wrote about their complicated histories with the film and the way they have reappraised it over the years as a groundbreaking work of art.)
A key part of its complicated legacy is that Hollywood did not respond to its success with a steady stream of more-inclusive projects highlighting women’s and/or Asian American stories and voices. (A lesson that still needs to be learned by the powers that be despite the more recent massive success of smashes like Crazy Rich Asians and Everything Everywhere All at Once.)
For many reasons, but especially for its artistic merits, it’s very much worthwhile to watch The Joy Luck Club today, whether it’s your first or your 400th viewing. Here are five reasons that we hope will inspire you to make time for it this month … especially since there might be a sequel in the works!
Writer Amy Tan
Long before she became a world-famous novelist, Amy Tan had already lived a life more colorful than any fiction. The daughter of immigrants from China, she grew up in Oakland, California. At the age of 15, Tan had to deal with her father and older brother dying from brain tumors, and then with her mother moving the remaining family to Switzerland.
While in college, her roommate was murdered, and Tan had to identify the body, an experience that left her dealing with recurring spells of becoming physically mute. Although she went on to pursue a doctorate in linguistics, Tan drifted through a series of jobs before becoming a business writer.
Inspired by the rich and tragic history of what her mother had survived in China and then in the United States, as well as her own complicated relationship with her, Tan began writing short stories, which formed the basis for her 1989 debut novel, The Joy Luck Club. Published to rave reviews and earning Tan multiple honors, including becoming a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the international Orange Prize, the book is a beautiful, hypnotically written meditation on mothers and daughters, the immigrant and first-generation experiences, and ultimately what it means to be human in a deeply flawed world.
It turned Tan into a global literary star who continued to publish acclaimed, successful novels while becoming a household name — a rare feat for any author. She even parodied herself and the reception to her work on The Simpsons, which had previously paid tribute to the emotional power of the novel and film.
It’s very much worth going back and revisiting Tan’s original novel, as well as her additional works to get the full impact of her lyrical, compelling writing. As beautiful and moving as the film is, in some ways it is even more rewarding to return to the source material that made it all possible.
The performances of the mothers
There are excellent performances across the board in the film, but the most unforgettable and moving ones come from the actresses who play the four mothers who make up the titular club. (Special shout-out to the younger actresses who play them beautifully in flashback sequences.) Flowers, flowers, flowers all around for Kieu Chinh as Suyuan Woo, France Nuyen as Ying-Ying St. Clair, Lisa Lu as An-Mei Hsu, and Tsai Chin as Lindo Jong.
The heart of the film, of course, is Chinh’s character, who dies during the course of the film but still casts a mighty shadow in the hearts and minds of her friends and family. Forced to make choices that very few would be strong enough to survive, Suyuan delivers a powerhouse scene near the end where she gifts her daughter with a necklace and an even more precious gift — the knowledge that she sees and loves her for who she is.
Nuyen shows enormous depths of strength as she plays a character who worries that her own inability to claim her voice, after being wracked with guilt over massive trauma, has weakened her daughter’s feelings of self-worth; a shot of her smoking in an artfully lit bedroom as she delivers a voice-over that her character cannot bring herself to say out loud will absolutely wreck you.
Showcasing a warmth and grace that masks a hard-earned determination and clear-eyed vision, Lu has an incredible scene where she tells her daughter the tragic story of what her own mother suffered and sacrificed on her behalf. Saying so much so subtly, she commands the screen as she urges her daughter to recognize her own value and to not only ask for but also demand what she deserves.
Stealing the entire movie, however, is Chin, whose character is rebellious, hardheaded, and imperious — but only with the best and warmest of intentions at heart. It’s hard to choose a best scene, but one of her standout moments includes a devastating confrontation with her daughter at a beauty salon that goes from stingingly raw to hilarious and healing in a matter of seconds, calibrated perfectly by an actress so gifted, a single look can convey oceans of meaning.
The performances of the daughters
The incredible work of the older actresses by no means takes away from the wonderful performances of the actresses playing their daughters. (Shout-out again to the even younger actresses who play them as their childhood selves.) Ming-Na Wen as June Woo, Lauren Tom as Lena St. Clair, Rosalind Chao as Rose Hsu Jordan, and Tamlyn Tomita as Waverly Jong add necessary and resonant halves to the whole of the combined relationships between their characters and their on-screen mothers.
Wen plays a quiet, strong young woman who doesn’t feel up to facing the world without her mother, or even attempting to fill her place at the mah-jongg table or beyond. She is called on to anchor the film with her character’s narrative through line of bidding adieu to her friends and family to take a long-awaited trip to China to meet her long-lost sisters. Her final scene, where she speaks to her sisters in Chinese with a very special message she could only deliver after finally coming to terms with her mother’s history, is perfect.
As a seemingly fragile and easily bullied young wife, Tom makes her character as vulnerable as she is sympathetic and relatable. It’s wildly impressive how she visibly goes on-screen from broken-down defeat to resolved to push back, and how this transformation in no way rings cartoonish or false — it truly feels as if we’re watching an intelligent young woman finally find and use her voice. And when we see a brief sweet scene of how her bold choice paid off for her, it’s impossible not to be moved.
Going through a mirror-reflection journey that Tom’s character underwent, Chao plays a wife who has devoted herself so completely to caring for and pleasing her husband that she has both pushed him away and lost sight of who she really is. The difference, of course, is that Jordan’s husband (Andrew McCarthy) is loving and mature enough to want to meet her where she is, and to change for her just as much as she is willing to change for him. Chao’s scene where she speaks up while sitting at a garden table in the pouring rain makes a huge impression.
As the former chess prodigy who grew up to be as hard-edged, pushy, and quick as her formidable mother, Tomita has the showiest scenes and strikes sparks in her scenes with Chin. Fully aware of her sharp tongue and locked into a lifelong rivalry, real or imagined, with Wen’s more thoughtful June, Tomita’s Waverly could easily have become a cardboard villain, but it’s a testament to the actress that she feels like a flesh-and-blood person with all the complications that entails. It’s an incredible performance and one that stays with you long after the film is over.
The emotion
There’s very little chance anyone is making it through this movie without crying, perhaps multiple times. Of course, there are countless beautiful character moments that strike a universal chord any mother/daughter (or parent/child, really) can relate to — the fraught nature of the overwhelming love and the obligation, the betrayals, the frustration, and the everything-and-then-some aspect of what it means to be tied to someone for a lifetime and even longer. In many creative and wise ways, this film listens to its women of all ages speaking honestly, and it is absolutely gorgeous.
There are also other scenes that depict more heightened situations that may be further from the everyday experience of many viewers but nevertheless ring true — and wrenchingly, painfully so. Honestly, even thinking about some of these scenes, I’m getting a little misty-eyed myself, especially with multiple scenes featuring mothers having to deal with their children being physically imperiled. Some of these scenes are hard to watch, but the way that they fit into the narrative and shape the women who experience them makes them necessary to experience and think about.
Regardless of who you are, The Joy Luck Club has a lot to say about courage and compassion that is crucial to all people. It’s a powerful, beautiful, important reminder — and viewing experience.
Andrew McCarthy’s standout performance
While the male characters in the film aren’t given as much of the spotlight — and rightfully so for this story — there are some nice performances in the film, including Chao-Li Chi as June’s father and former Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy as Rose’s estranged husband. Beloved for his lightly comic performances throughout the ’80s (including leading this charmer), McCarthy takes a very small but important role in The Joy Luck Club, delivering perhaps his most fully realized dramatic performance ever. But even more notably, he has never looked dreamier on-screen. Always handsome enough to get the girl at the high school prom, McCarthy is the definition of dreamy in this film — to the point where it’s almost distracting, in the best way possible. (Extra points, of course, for the character being beautiful on the inside too.) Watch it again, and let us know what you think!
Jonathan Riggs is a freelance writer and former managing editor of the LGBTQ+ lifestyle magazine Instinct.
Get Shondaland directly in your inbox: SUBSCRIBE TODAY
