American Rules and Chinese Faces: The Games of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

This article revisits what arguably has remained the most celebrated and vilified Asian American novel to date: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989). Reproducing the formal structure of a game of mahjongg and using gaming tropes to dramatize the relationships between four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters, the novel immerses its readers in the paradoxical connection between freedom and constraint through assimilation games that transform Chinese immigrant “victims” into Asian American “victors.” These games in turn allow Tan to challenge traditional forms of inter- and intragenerational affiliation and notions of kinship found in much canonical Asian American literature.