I finished reading The Joy Luck Club just a few days ago. It’s a short book—certainly not one of the thickest I’ve ever read. It’s just shy of three hundred pages, and they’re not those Lord of the Rings style pages with miniscule font. (You know, all those fantasy epics use the same font. What’s up with that?) By the number of words, it should have taken me about a week to read, so why did it take months?
It wasn’t that I disliked the book, or that it was so intense I had to put it down for days at a time. It just took me forever to read. It…well, it contained so much. The format, of course, is conducive to taking frequent breaks from the book. It’s presented as a collection of short stories told by seven different people, and each story is maybe twenty or so pages. They’re not dense, they’re compact, or that was how I thought of them. There was so much story, so much life in each one, that I didn’t quite know what to do with them.
It’s impossible to describe the plot of The Joy Luck Club. It has none, or if it does, the plot is tangential to the novel’s contents. Could I say what it’s about? Sort of. It’s a book that is quintessentially Chinese. Reading it was like reading someone else’s account of my own family secrets. It almost felt wrong that these things should be put out for the world to see.
Only Chinese people read this book and really understand it. It wasn’t written to be a peephole into my culture. It was written for me, me, I thought, clinging to each word for minutes on end. I read this book slothlike, digging my claws into each paragraph, reluctant to stay but reluctant to move on and let the pure culture slip from my fingers (or claws, in this metaphor, I guess). Amy Tan understood me, understood my fear of losing my history, my endless respect for and exasperation with immigrant parents, my paranoia of not being the shining example of Chineseness I’m supposed to be.
Which begs the question, how in the hell did this book get published?
If there’s one rule in any industry, it’s that being Asian doesn’t sell unless you fetishize it. Yeah, we all went insane for Crazy Rich Asians—that was because we’ve never seen ourselves like that, at least not in the mainstream media. As regular old people. We’re lucky to get a half-assed stereotype character. We were lucky to have Rose Tico (and believe me, I’ve got some words for JJ Abrams about her treatment in Rise of Skywalker).
Asianness isn’t sexy. The Joy Luck Club is a book completely and totally about Asianness. I didn’t read it as universally relatable, because it isn’t. It’s not a cute story about how oh, we’re not really all that different after all. It’s about being totally isolated within a culture that claims to welcome everyone. It’s about scrabbling out a little cave for yourself, and then someone else shoving a stick in your cave and yelling, hey, why isn’t there room for me in there? The pure Chineseness of it all is inescapable.
Why did anyone who wasn’t Chinese buy this book? Was it the new format? Did they want a window into what being Chinese means? Did they want knowledge? Truth? What does a good book offer to people who can’t, by simple virtue of who they are, understand it?
Ironically, the very phenomenon I’m confused by prevents me from answering my own question: I don’t understand non-Chinese people, because I’m Chinese. So all my ramblings are, I suppose, fruitless, and I end up with exactly the same number of questions I began with. If any of you non-Chinese folk want to offer your perspective, please enlighten me—I’m at a loss.
Also, this was, like, six hundred and fifty words. Oops.
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