Part 1, Parable Summary

The Joy Luck Club is a multi-generational and multi-cultural story told from the viewpoints of each speaker. It is a complicated and often hard to follow story line because the Chinese families' origins differ by province of birth, language, religion, education, and socio-economic levels. The writer often leaves the reader confused with the given names of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, and their individual connections with the past and present. One can see watch the women age from childhood to young women, to having good, bad, or arranged marriages, surviving disasters, and then becoming the old women of this book with grown daughters who have their own names, nicknames, married names, stories, and problems.

An old woman buys a swan in Shanghai. It is too beautiful to eat. The old woman and the swan sail to America, where the woman will have...