Amy Tan writes her books with a social communicational aim towards people. Her books become best-sellers in the New York Times for months at times. Her first book The Joy Luck Club is one of the best sellers. The Joy Luck Club is a first-person drama that takes place in San Francisco during the late 1940's and through the 1950's; told in four sections by 16 different narrators.
The book centers on Jing-mei's trip to China to meet her half-sisters, twins; Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa. These sisters stayed behind in China because Suyuan, Jing-mei's mother, was forced to leave them behind during her desperate flight from Japan's attack on Kweillin during World War II. Jing-mei was born years after in America, to another father. Suyuan died before she could reach her daughters although she found the address of her lost daughters.
Jing-mei had taken her mother's place in playing mahjong at a weekly gathering her mother had organized in China and revived in San Francisco called the Joy Luck Club. The other members of the club "Lindo, Ying-ying, and An-mei "were three of Suyuan's best friends and fellow immigrants before she had passed on. They told Jing-mei about how her mother had found the address of her half sister and urged her to go to China and tell them about their mother's life; but Jing-mei has doubts whether she can .
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tell her mother's story. The three older women fear that Jing-mei's doubts may be justified. They fear that their own daughters, like Jing-mei, may not know or appreciate the stories of their mothers' lives.
Of the four sections of four different narratives; the first section is the mothers telling of how they recall their relationships with their mothers with amazing clarity. They worry that their daughter's memory of them will never have the intensity of their memories of their own mothers. Following that section, Waverly, Jing-mei, Lena, and Rose "relate their memories of their childhood with their moms; the great lucidity and force with which they tell their stories proves their moms' fears at least partially untrue.