Invisible Borders and Trauma in The Joy Luck Club Between Amy Tan’s Novel (1989) and Wayne Wang’s Cinematic Adaptation (1993)

This research paper is an analytical, comparative study of Amy Tan’s twentieth-century diasporic novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989). It investigates the impact of invisible borders on both mothers and daughters in their cultural fluctuation between Chinese roots and American novelty. The boundaries that separate the two worlds can become so blurred out when one decides to move beyond topographical and physical terrains. In a Chinese-American milieu, there is the heavy weight of cultural limitations and taboos that are unspoken of in the midst of the immigrants’ hybrid lives. While the differences between book and screen adaptation have previously been described as minor sub-plot deviations, these changes still hold great significance in how Western societies perceive other cultures. The aim is to assess the level of intergenerational trauma Tan’s characters have sustained through a set of socially imposed borders and the ways they have decided to deal with it in both novel and film adaptation. The research relies on Hannah Arendt’s socio-cultural theory of the seemingly stateless identity and its correlation with the immigrants’ intergenerational trauma to examine how this kind of pressure put upon the characters affects their lives in the United States.