Joy Luck Club Summary

             Summary of Joy luck club.
             Jing-mei Woo's mother and father, Suyuan and Canning Woo, emigrated from China to live in San Francisco in 1949. Suyuan revived the Joy Luck Club, a weekly mahjong party she began in Kweilin, China. Her first husband, Wang Fuchi, was an officer in the Kuomintang and had left Suyuan and their twin daughters, Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa in Kweilin while he traveled to Chungking. Kweilin was packed with refugees and cultural, ethnic, and class tensions were rampant. Suyuan created the Joy Luck Club with three other women to escape the fear and uncertainty of the war. They traded stories and played mahjong into the night.
             An officer warned Suyuan to travel to Chungking to be with her husband because the Japanese were coming. Suyuan packed as much as she could and began to walk to Chunking with her children, a few belongings, and some food in a wheelbarrow, but she arrived in Chungking with only three silk dresses. She did not tell Jing-mei what happened to her twin babies.
             Two months after Suyuan dies of an aneurysm, Canning asks Jing-mei to take Suyuan's place in the Joy Luck Club. Jing-mei cannot believe that she could ever really replace her mother, but she agrees anyway. Jing-mei remembers her mother's critical attitude toward everyone. Suyuan and Lindo always compared their daughters, Jing-mei and Waverly, from an early age. Jing-mei feels inadequate because she never succeeded in becoming the prize daughter that Waverly is and never even finished college.
             Jing-mei is relieved when her first Joy Luck Club party dies down. She prepares to leave, but her mother's friends inform her that Suyuan had succeeded in locating her twin daughters after a life-long search. She died before she could contact them at the address she discovered, so they wrote a letter in her name and received a letter from Jing-mei's sisters in response. They want Jing-mei to travel to China and tell her sisters about Suyuan's life; they give her $1,200 for the trip.