A Mother-loving Distress! (“Tardy for the Party” Edition)*
The Joy Luck Club
(*Late Post: Here’s a video to cheer you up!)
Ballantine Books, 1989
ISBN: 0-8041-0630-4
Pages: 332
Reading Time: 3 days
Deya’s Taglines:
~ You’re smothering me.
~ Mother knows west.
Cover: The cover of the book doesn’t really tell me much and evokes a lot of stereotypes I’d like to run the other way from. There are dragons slithering along the edge of the title whose cartoonish nature makes it hard to take them seriously. I think a nice dignified watercolor would have been better.
Movie: The Joy Luck Club
Year: 1993
Directed by: Wayne Wang
Produced by: Oliver Stone
Length: 139 min.
They brought you into this world and they can take you out.
I thought I’d read this book because I had taken a class on Mothers and Daughters a few years ago. Granted, the class was a German class, but I feel the Pandora’s box that is mother-daughter interaction is an international sort of thing. It’s archetypal, for example, to wish for a mute button when your mother criticizes your outfit or if you’re a mother, to medicate yourself/drink enough to stand your children’s whining**. Even the dear Maya Angelou who does not allow negative commentary in her home has something to say about her mother.
“To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.”
