"My Mom Is A Fucking Bitch."

Discovering The Elephant in the Room With Amy Tan.

As readers may know, The Joy Luck Club is possibly the most popular and widely read novel written by an Asian-American author. Although loved by the mainstream, the book is either adored or reviled by Asian-Americans and since its publication a degree of contention has surrounded the novel. Some critics (such as Frank Chin) lambast the book for perpetuating stereotypes and many Asian men complain that the novel depicts Asian men unfairly. Like it or hate it, The Joy Luck Club is the work that many point to as representative of the vast difference between the experiences of Asian-American men and women. Although first published over twenty years ago, the subsequent "controversy" over the book's content seems to have set the tone for much of the inter-gender dialogue within the Asian minority in the two decades since.

There is very little doubt that out of all the ways that the Asian minority seems dis-united, the divide between Asian-American men and women is the most widely discussed and contentious. For some (perhaps many) The Joy Luck Club is the book that made it fashionable for Asian women to be outspoken about their disdain for Asian men and perhaps even made this rejection a necessity in the process of Asian-American feminist empowerment. For me then, there is no question that The Joy Luck Club could be considered to be something of a watershed in the Asian minority experience and particularly in the manner in which the genders interact.

Despite the apparent gravity of the anger and frustration that the book has elicited, I do,  nevertheless, find that it can offer us some intriguing insights into the experiences of the Asian minority. Moving beyond these ideas of inter-gender conflict, the novel is fascinating to me for the sole reason that it simply ignores any kind of Asian-American (or even simply American) historical context.

The American part of the story takes place mainly between the 1950's and 70's, which as readers might know was an extremely turbulent period in American history. It was during this period that America, amongst other things, went from practising apartheid to promoting civil rights, engaged in a highly divisive war in SE Asia, put several men into space, developed the H-bomb, created youth culture, experienced several inner-city race riots, empowered women and gays, and saw the rise of an open drug culture. This is not to mention the social effects of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust that hung over almost every aspect of western creative expression of the period. Apparently, the young Americanized Asian women that the novel describes were somehow unaware of any of these dramatic and world-view building shifts in the culture to which they belonged.

The effect is surreal since despite growing up in a period that could be described as volatile and dynamic, the Americanized characters in the book seemed to have missed the entire experience. Imagine if we had the story of Dr. Zhivago but with characters that are unaffected by the turbulent Russian Revolution. What we would be left with is a sappy love story with one-dimensional and self-absorbed characters. From a purely Asian-American perspective the disconnect from historical context is even more remarkable. At this time anti-misegenation laws forbidding Asian men from marrying white women still existed in several states. Anti-Asian racism was still deeply entrenched in the laws and social context of the time. Racially biased immigration policies limiting Asian immigration were still in force, plus citizenship and property rights were only recently given to the Asian minority. Strangely, none of these factors that had defined the experiences of the Asian minority at the time make it into the consciousness of the characters in the book.

Of course it can be argued that the story describes a universal human condition in a way that goes beyond race and racist restrictions, yet this seems inadequate since the human condition is very much informed by its social  environment. In fact, the story might possibly have been more powerful and universal if the complexities of the Asian-American experience of the time had been referenced in some way. A good example of this in action is the movie "Precious" - set against the backdrop of African-American poverty, the movie describes personal human tragedy that interweaves effortlessly with the historical and social context. Compared to this, the Joy Luck Club seems soap opera-ish.

It is for these reasons that I've always found the Americanized daughters described by Tan to be extremely annoying. Their apparent self-absorption is so profound that they don't seem to realize that the success they achieve in America was built upon the struggle against oppression of those who came before. They seem oblivious to the fact that their ability to effortlessly make dating and marriage choices across the racial divide was a right paid for with the blood of thousands, and that even at the time that the events were being described was a right denied to ethnic minority men and women in many states. Effectively, the Americanized characters described by Tan seem so disconnected from the social and historical realities of their time that they can only be described as borderline sociopathic.

This for me is the ultimate legacy of The Joy Luck Club. If we move beyond the bickering of the interracial dating disparity and view the novel objectively, it should become apparent that the book sets a mode of consciousness for ensuing generations of Asian-Americans that is mundane, socially disconnected and heavily biased toward emotionalism. By definition these qualities are dependent, irrelevent and ultimately favour the irrational adherence to disadvantage that drives the emotional appeal. Fundamentally, this type of approach is impotent for both Asian men and women and directs the dialogue of the Asian experience away from rational discourse that is based upon logical assements. If we ignore the very circumstances that create our world-view, then all we have left is emotive irrelevence.

I would argue that much of the creative, political and sociological commentary of the Asian minority follows this example of the appeal to emotion. The principles of rational argumentation and intellectual honesty take a back-seat to emotional necessity. I would suggest that The Joy Luck Club stands as the leading model for this mode of thinking that continues to the present. As a community that still struggles to define itself the reliance on emotionalism is ultimately detrimental to this cause. So in the end, the thinking espoused by The Joy Luck Club can only be viewed as a literary and intellectual dead-end that promotes short-term emotional expression but that has ultimately failed to inspire a rational, intellectually honest world-view.