SOURCE: “Swan-Feather Mothers and Coca-Cola Daughters: Teaching Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club,” in Teaching American Ethnic Literatures, University of New Mexico Press, 1996, pp. 327–45.

In the following essay, Ho argues that Tan accurately and realistically portrays the complicated lives of immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters and that these fictional portrayals are instructive, especially when placed in the context of the oppression of women in China.

A. Analysis of Themes and Forms

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is not a book in praise of “Oriental exotics” or passive victims. Nonetheless a number of critics and readers think that Amy Tan writes stories about a tantalizing, mysterious, and romanticized Old China or an exoticized Other. Some reviewers comment more about Tan than about the book, referring to her as “the flavor of the month, the hot young thing, the exotic new voice” (Streitfeld, F8); others invoke stereotypes...