The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

I have been wanting to read The Joy Luck Club for a few years, and I was finally able to. It is the story of four Chinese women who come to America to escape their war-torn country and thier American-born daughter who struggle with thier families' heritage and assimilation into American culture.

It starts out with June, the daughter of the recently passed founder of the Joy Luck Club, contemplating her mother's life and her new position in this group of women. Since her mother's death, the other members of the club have asked June to take her mother's place at the mah jong table. The women request that June travel to China to learn about her mother's past and to meet her orphaned half-sisters to tell them about their mother's death. The book continues on telling the story of each woman's childhood and then later, adulthood. The Joy Luck Club is a beautifully written book that I highly recommend to anyone, but think women will relate to more than men.

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. --Amazon.com

Read a few pages: http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Luck-Club-Amy-Tan/dp/0804106304/sr=8-2/qid=1167672280/ref=pd_bbs_2/105-4307603-4662060?ie=UTF8&s=books