Unit 5 The Joy Luck Club

1. Unit 5 The Joy Luck Club By Zheng Weiwei

2. About the author：Amy Tan • American woman writer； • Chinese immigrants’ posterity; • Biographical work: double identity; cultural difference between mother and daughter.

3. About the novel:The Joy Luck Club (1989) • an immediate and sensational success; • translated into seventeen languages, including Chinese; • staying more than 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list; • received the Commonwealth Gold Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award .

4. About the novel • explores intergenerational and intercultural relationships; • sixteen interlocking stories all revolve around the Joy Luck Club women and their daughters; • Narration is full of flashbacks to the mothers’ lives in China.

5. Warm-up Discussion • Culture shock can be described as the feeling of confusion and disorientation that one experiences when faced with a large number of new and unfamiliar people and situations.Can you imagine what kind of culture shock would you experience if you go abroad?

6. Plot: Half and Half • Rose was concerned about telling her mother An-mei about the divorce with her husband, because her parents had always believed in their ability to do things well; they called this faith nengkan. However, their nengkan did not enable them to recover their son Bing from the seashore. Rose finally realized that she could not prevent her crumbling marriage from falling apart, just as she could not stop her younger brother Bing from falling into the water years ago.

7. Characters • An-mei: Capable, able, traditional, conventional, religious; • Rose: Westernized, believer in fate.

8. Theme • Gap between mother and daughter; • Barrier between different cultures; • Religion; • Fate vs. faith.

9. Generation Gap • Rose: • not superstitious; • Believer in fate An-mei: • Superstitious; • Religious; • Believer in ability.

10. Cultural hints • With imagined tragedy hovering over us, we became inseparable, two halves creating the whole: yin and yang. (Rose as the narrator) • My mother had a superstition, in fact, that children were predisposed to certain dangers on certain days, all depending on their Chinese birthdate. It was explained in a little Chinese book called The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates.

11. Paragraph Appreciation(1) • I have to admit that what I initially found attractive in Ted were precisely the things that made him different from my brothers and the Chinese boys I had dated: his brashness; the assuredness in which he asked for things and expected to get them; his opinionated manner; his angular face and lanky body; the thickness of his arms; the fact that his parents immigrated from Tarrytown, New York, not Tientsin, China.

12. Paragraph Appreciation(2) 2. Ted had casually invited me to a family picnic…“I’m so glad to meet you finally,” Mrs. Jordan said. I wanted to tell her I wasn’t really Ted’s girlfriend, but she went on. “I think it’s nice that you and Ted are having such a lot of fun together. So I hope you won’t misunderstand what I have to say.”

13. And then she spoke quietly about Ted’s future, his need to concentrate on his medical studies, why it would be years before he could even think about marriage. She assured me she had nothing whatsoever against minorities; she and her husband, who owned a chain of office-supply stores, personally knew many fine people who were Oriental, Spanish, and even black. But Ted was going to be in one of those professions where he would be judged by a different standard, by patients and other doctors who might not be as understanding as the Jordans were. She said it was so unfortunate the way the rest of the world was, how unpopular the Vietnam War was.

14. Activity Group Work: • Immigrants are often confronted with the threat of gradually losing their own cultural roots and identity. Can you work in groups and brainstorm the ways to cope with this situation?

15. Role Play • Each group acts out one episode of the story. You could use the narrator as the voice-over(旁白). • Episodes: • When Ted and I were dating; • When the marriage of Ted and I started to go wrong; • When Bing fell into the sea; • After Bing had fallen into the sea.