Jeff O'Neill (2:17)

And if you're listening in the Podcast player on your phone, on the computer, wherever you can look in the show notes, you can find that link. You can also find links to our very nascent, I would say at this point, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube feeds. We're running on fumes here, recording at the end of 2025 a little bit and those things be up and running a little bit more into 2026. But as you are listening to this, they will be more up and running. As Rebecca said, if you have a chance to hit the five stars to rate interview on the Apple podcast player, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast, it's terrific. And please do shoot us an email@zero to well read bookriot.com I recently got a very nice email from someone talking about the name Ebenezer and what it means in the Bible and how to.

Rebecca Schinsky (3:02)

Fascinating. All right.

Jeff O'Neill (3:03)

And I would like to say to that person, thank you. And I also like to say that I think Dickens used that name just because it sounds like someone who would be a bad guy. I don't think it has much to do with actual biblical Ebenezer, though. It's interesting. I think just Ebenezer Scrooge sounds like one of the great skin flints of all time. So there you go. But always willing and interested here. Got a couple of requests to submit, requests for things we're going to cover. We need some verbal text expander for this. Rebecca, we hear you. We see you. Whatever you say will probably not tip the scales one way or the other. Trust us when we say unto you, thou reader, listener.

Rebecca Schinsky (3:43)

The list is long.

Jeff O'Neill (3:44)

We have written your book down, wherever it is, whatever it is.

Rebecca Schinsky (3:48)

The list is long. But if you would like a peek at the upcoming reading lists, we're doing some of those reveals for the Patreon members. So that's a way to get a little insider information. And there will be points where we're between a couple of titles and we're gonna take a listener vote. And those things will also happen for our exclusive members as well.

Jeff O'Neill (4:05)

All right, so that brings us to the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Rebecca, before we talk, you did a really wonderful synopsis here, as you always do. Is there a particular reason we're doing this one right now or. We just wanted to do it.

Rebecca Schinsky (4:20)

We just wanted to do it. I was programmed. Well, I just wanted to do it. I was programming the season. And one of the things that we care about at Book Riot, one of the things that we care about for the show is a well rounded, diverse reading list. In a bunch of senses. We didn't have an Asian American writer in the first season, so I was looking for one of the signal works. And Joy Luck Club is high up on the list. Also very beloved and many people have heard about it. And for me, it definitely sits in the zero to well read zone of you might have read it in school and it's been a while or you heard about it or you saw the movie, but it's more than 30 years old, so there's a lot of space where it's accumulated cultural meaning and then kind of gone fallow. Tan gave rise and opened the door to a lot of other writers, which is a really wonderful thing to see. And of course, American culture has evolved quite a bit in the years since it was written. So I just thought this would be a fun way to put a more contemporary kind of classic in where we've been doing some older books lately.

Jeff O'Neill (5:24)

It's a super interesting time period from now, right where it's now at this point, almost 40 years old. It's coming up on 40 years old in a couple years. And that falls into a bit of an interesting. Not crack, but like something that's older than 50 years. It starts to become a classic. Then we're getting into, you know, catch 22s. 20 years before this. We're looking at To Kill a Mockingbird, things that seem firmly ensconced into literary history. And then things that are newer than this feel like contemporary books that may have been influential, but we're not really yet considering them for the, I guess the longer term canon here where something at this age where people in living memory remember when it comes out. So easy to over and underestimate a book depending on how old you were when it came out. If it was like from ancient history, it has gravitas if it was new, you know, kind of like music when you were 19, whatever was hot then was the best music of all time. And so it lends itself a kind of weight. It does seem like there's sort of a holding period between about 20 and 50 years where we're kind of waiting to see if this is going to be a book that lasts longer than that. And I think the jury's out a little bit on Joy Luck Club. And I think we'll talk about some of the reasons why, even if it's not the kind of book that's read in another 10, 25 or 50 years, still hugely influential for the kind of books that will come after Amy Tan and the Joy Luck Club. Are also their own kind of brand names. I think I have this in my I don't know if it's a hot take or straight thought, it sort of straddles the two. But like the title, Joy Luck Club works as something people remember and people remember Amy Tan wrote the Joy Luck Club and that you can't buy that kind of branding. And I'd love to know if they went through a bunch of titles. I would imagine they probably landed on it pretty quickly. But the Joy Luck Club, as you said, has imprinted to some degree on people who read and care about books, and it'll be interesting to see if it endures.

Rebecca Schinsky (7:28)

This episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth. This year I'm getting really intentional about resetting my home, especially my evening routine, because that five to nine window is the part of the day that really matters to me. I've been building this little nightly ritual with Cozy Earth and honestly, it's becoming my favorite part of the day. Day I start with a bubble bath. Obviously I'm reading a great book, and then I wrap up in one of their luxe bath towels, which are so unbelievably soft, but they also dry you off really quickly. After that, I slip into Cozy Earth's bamboo stretch knit pajamas, which are the kind of comfort that feels effortless and still looks put together. And then there's the bedding. Climbing into fresh, luxurious sheets at the end of the night makes my entire space feel calmer. It's the easiest way to signal to my body that it's time to slow down, to rest de and to reset for the next day. Cozy Earth also makes it easy to try. There's a 100 night sleep trial and a 10 year warranty, which says a lot about their quality. If you're ready to start the new year with a true reset, head to cozyearth.com and use code BOOKRIOT for up to 20% off. And if you get a post purchase survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth right here. That's cozyearth.com using code bookriot for 20% off cozyearth.com, code book riot today's episode.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (8:49)

Is brought to you by Flatiron Books, publisher of My Husband's Wife by Alice Feeney the New York Times best selling queen of twists is back with a psychological masterpiece that will leave you questioning everything you know about love, identity and revenge. So Eden Fox is an artist on the brink of her big break and she sets off for a run before her first exhibition when she returned to the home she recently moved into called Spyglass. And in chat haunting old house in Hope Falls, nothing is as it should be. Her key doesn't fit. A woman eerily similar to her answers the door. And on top of all of that, her husband insists that the stranger is his wife. My husband's wife is a tangled web of deception, obsession and mystery that will keep you guessing until the last page. Prepare yourself for the ultimate mind bending marriage thriller and step inside Spyglass if you dare to experience a story where nothing is as it seems. And sure to pick up my husband's wife by Alice Feeney. Thanks again to flatiron Books for sponsoring this episode.

Jeff O'Neill (9:56)

Before we get too much farther into Rebecca, we better tell the people what it's about. You want to take a crack at this?

Rebecca Schinsky (10:00)

Yeah. So this is Amy Tan's first book. It came out in 1989. It's a novel in stories about four Chinese American women and their mothers. The women are in their like late 30s, early 40s. In the book, their mothers are in their 70s or so. And the mothers immigrated to the US in the late 1940s, early 1950s, during the Second Sino War and the Japanese invasion of China. So these four families live in San Francisco. The parents all met at church and they form what they call the Joy Luck Club, which starts off as a Mah Jong club and becomes this sort of, we would call it a chosen family today. Yes, they get together, they play Mah Jong, but they also raise money together. It's a real source of community support, literal financial support for each other. A makeshift family in the times where these, these people have left everything that they know behind in China and they came to the US with nothing and knowing no one. So they find each other and they start fresh. And it has all the complexities that accompany a long running friend group and an extended kind of family. The book structure is four parts that are each divided into four sections. And the novel begins when one of the mothers has died and her daughter June is called up to take her mother's place in the Joy Luck Club. And now she's gonna hang out with the parents every Friday night. She's gonna to different stories.

Jeff O'Neill (11:23)

They start playing mahjong at midnight. I was like, whoa, these people are.

Rebecca Schinsky (11:27)

Way past my bedtime. And each of the 16 vignettes in the story or in the book is told by one of the women. All of the voices are present except for the mother who dies before the book begins. Two of the sections focus on the mother's stories and Two of the sections focus on the daughter's stories and Amy Tan really uses this to illuminate the older generation's experiences in China and as immigrants to the US and the younger women's experiences as they have that real first generation immigrant tension between all of their parents hopes and expectations and dreams and desires for them and their own desires for freedom and agency and independence, the things that come with growing up in America. There's a non linear structure. So it really is more a collection of portraits whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts than it is a clear through line narrative kind of novel that you might expect. And even of the four sections also opens with a parable that is thematically tied to the vignettes in that section. There are bits of Chinese folklore and mythology and a lot of the book does have the sort of like mythic quality because Tan is dealing with epic life and death stuff alongside quotidian concerns. And all of it feels important, like it wasn't in the lexicon at the time that the book came out. But the book is in many ways an exploration of generational trauma. And watching the movie, reading the the book through that lens today was certainly interesting for me.

Jeff O'Neill (13:01)

Yeah. And the actual stories themselves. We're going to go into our own reading experiences, but if you haven't read this before and you decide to pick it up, we don't quite have a word for what this book is. Because you say novel and stories. That's not wrong. I'm not sure it's right either. It's also not link short stories. It's not a novel. It is its own. I can't think of anything that's so similar because it's much more like the character set is tight, but the stories don't really cross over except very much in passing. So to call it a novel and stories, I think it's actually four novellas that are broken up into pieces and then put together in an interesting way. I think that's what it actually is.

Rebecca Schinsky (13:40)

I think this is a good moment to pause on this structure. It was written as a collection of short stories, but an early review referred to it as a novel. And the publisher, like the marketers at the publisher, recognized it would sell better if it was called a novel, which is absolutely true. Selling short stories, especially debut short stories, is damn near impossible. So they ran with calling it a novel. But if you pick this up looking for the kind of narrative threads that you're looking for in a novel, you're not going to find them here.

Jeff O'Neill (14:09)

So I think we're going to come back to talk about. I think the structure actually really matters for what Tan is consciously and maybe subconsciously doing with this. And part of that, as you said, the generational trauma and then understanding, especially for these women. Because if you think about 1989, the present action of this book is contemporary with the moment Tan is writing it. Right. It's 40ish years after the parents event. So it's very much a moment of time. And I know less about this history from popular fiction, but I'll say this, that it was groundbreaking to have a book by a Chinese American author be at the top of the bestseller list. A book that people were reading in book clubs across the country that were in. This was pre Barnes and Noble for all. So it was in Walden Books. Right. You know, that's the kind of. In bookstores and other places like this. And it really caught on. And it caught on above, beyond, through, into wider American culture than the Asian American or Chinese American community itself. And that really, I don't think I did a little reading about this. I don't think that really had happened before. You had some stories about non white folks breaking through, like, roots, but really not to this effect. And we could talk about the books that feel like kind of were birthed from this overcoat. To quote, you know, something that someone said about Gogol's Overcoat. The short story is like that short story birthed a lot of Russian literature. I think this one opened up reader and market, readers and markets to a broader sense of Americanness or what American stories could be that may or may not have hyphens in them. But to read them, you didn't need to be closed off from them because there was a hyphen in the identity of the person who is writing it. And that continues apace. I mean, I think that's probably the single largest effect of this. And again, it's not. Not this and then this. It's not a strict if then conditional. And I think we would have gotten there anyway. But I do think Joy Luck Club was at the right place at the right time. But also it's extraordinary work and it's sensitive and difficult. But at this moment, in the academy as well, sort of the peaking of multicultural studies and the nascent formation of, you know, sort of sub American, like American Chinese American Studies or African American Studies in the academy. So I think it was also one of those books that was available, it grew out of, and also was available to the movement at the same time. Not unlike when we talked about their eyes were watching God at that particular moment when it was rediscovered by Alice Walker, there was a audience, a hunger, a market, for lack of a better term, for a story like this told in this particular way. So I think that's the primary reason that it's important, not that it's important now, is that we live in the long wake of the Joy Luck Club. And again, I want to emphasize it's not Joy Luck Club caused all this, but it was there, it was representative, and I think it probably helped move things forward, but at exactly the right moment in the late 80s, because also remember, we are a year after Beloved, in three years until Beloved will win the Nobel Prize. So this was the. The publishing industry that Tan was writing into. And I read several interviews with Tan. I had no sense of how she was participating in that. You have a note down below this. She was reading Louise Erdrich, which is super interesting. But she, either ingenuously or not, seems to be super naive about the publishing industry. So it's hard to even draw a straight line between what she was trying to do and what she was wanting.

Rebecca Schinsky (18:01)

She's like brand new to it. She started writing in the early 80s and found herself in a writing workshop and started working on this book, and it gets published in 87, like she is. She's very fresh. I think all of that naivete about what was happening at the time of Joy Luck Club is genuine. And as you're saying, we really cannot overstate how influential this was. At the time. Asian American stories were not being told for mainstream, that code word, white reading audiences at the time. And I read a paperback edition that had Amy Tan's introduction for the 30th anniversary of the book. And she says these were quirky stories written by an unknown Chinese American author. And in those days, books written by an unknown, or in those days, books that were non mainstream were turned, were termed ethnic, enjoyed by special readers, largely those who were in ethnic studies programs. So, like, that this got published was a big deal, that it got as much attention as it did and as wide of a readership. And then the momentum that took it into a big studio adaptation was a huge deal. Like just a huge deal. It was published in March of 1996, 1989, by Putnam. The original print run was 25,000 copies. And she said she expected to sell maybe 5,000 copies. The book went back to print. There were more than 110,000 copies in print less than three weeks after its publication. Big deal. And then nine houses competed for the reprint rights in an auction in April. So like a month after it comes out, nine different publishing houses are competing for reprint rights. Vintage Books won those for a $1.2 million, which would be a 3.1 million dol dollar book deal today. Just enormous. The book goes on to be a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was generally well reviewed. It didn't make the New York Times Notables for the year, which I think is notable in itself. And I wonder if they could hop in the DeLorean and go back and correct the record for 89, what they would do. But now there's an estimated more than 5 million copies sold worldwide. So Joy Luck Club's doing just fine with that.

Jeff O'Neill (20:10)

You know, Natalie said, I meant to go back and look to see what was on the notables list in 1989. It's not super easy to see the archive there. I think it's also notable too. I did read an article that was a roundup in the Times about high advances in 1987 and that's when this book was sold to Putnam.

Rebecca Schinsky (20:30)

Yeah, when the deal got made and.

Jeff O'Neill (20:31)

The great Robert Gottlieb was then the head of William Morrow. And we're talking talking about how this book had a $50,000 advanced in 1987, which was a significant advance. Like it's not. It's not quite the kind of levels advances you see from super high end debut novelists today. Also funny to see so much of the discourse about it's easier for an unknown author to get a huge advance than someone with a tracker. We see these conversations even today. But a $50,000 advance for a book like this suggested the publisher thought there was a market for it. Now I think it underestimated it. But this was not an academic press. This was not a flyer. Like they invested quite heavily in this book and it paid off. So they were seeing something nascent in the market as well. That publishers see nascent things in the market all the time that never turn into something. But they thought there was some reason to think this book had a shot and they underestimated it. But they did sense something that was I think there and I think that's interesting to think about at this point.

Rebecca Schinsky (21:28)

And it's currently still number four on Goodreads for the most popular books published in 1989. It's only behind the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Pillars of the Earth and A Time to Kill. It's ahead of Remains of the Day and Ishiguro has a Nobel Prize. So Amy Tan continues to be really important for, like, for this moment in American fiction. It was also selected for NPR's Great American Read Project in 2018 when there was a list of readers 100 favorite books. It was number 42. And then continuing with the groundbreaking stuff, the 1993 adaptation had a majority Asian cast and brought in 32 at the box office, equivalent to 71 million today. Several studios passed because they thought that the main characters, especially young main characters in a big movie like this, needed to be white in order to get an audience out. And then that's a conversation that folks who were paying attention to movies back in 2018 will remember because we did another round of it when Crazy Rich Asians came out. And that hearkened back to what happened with Joy Luck Club Book still appears on a lot of syllabi today. I think this continues to be read, but many firsts in a category do. It's fallen out of the popular conversation because it opened the door for so many other writers who have carried that conversation forward. And the way that Chinese American and Asian American fiction is treated in US publishing today is much wider, largely in part due to Amy Tan's success here.

Jeff O'Neill (23:02)

And you have a note here that it still appears on many high school syllabi. And I was thinking about that and I think I understand why. I think I have a note here and what it's like to read. It is not difficult to read from a sentence point of view. Like you understand what is happening. Yes, the language is spare and straightforward. It can be quite moving at times. But you're not going to have to spend a lot of time parsing sentences and paragraphs to figure out what's going on, though it is not. It doesn't not do. It doesn't do a lot of handholding when it comes to this character's here in this place in time. Like Tan really trusts the reader to be able to figure out, oh, that's who this person is and that's how they're related to this other person. And you, you know, you allow yourself some time to get used to it. Look at, look back, go make sure you know whose father or whose mother is whose and whose daughter is whose and whose grandmother is who. That's super important. But I think it also does introduce people to core ideas that have been built upon around generations of immigrant experiences, histories that people come with things that are said and unsaid. And we're going to talk a lot about this. The complicated Dynamics of intra family relationships with everyone can relate to may not have the same structure or directionality, but the idea that there's a lot more going on in your house, in between people, in between generations, then get set around the dinner table is super, super relatable. And that's not something that, I don't know. I was trying to think of the wanting to crack open the silences that Tan is trying to do here. And especially when I think of like, you know, the portraits of American families in the 70s, you know, the Updikes or the Roths or something like this, even the Didion, it doesn't really turn back to where you get at the end of the Joy Luck Club and this, you know, as we should say at the top of all these shows, we're going to talk about the whole thing. At the end of this, you get a gem you can hold in your pocket about what might be an understanding that might be possible. It is hopeful. It's called the Joy Luck Club. And that Joy Luck is sort of a different way of understanding what hope is, but it suggests all this crappy stuff happens, all this terrible things happen, and we've hurt each other so bad, and yet there is still a place where we can maybe come together in our hearts and minds and have some kind of reconciliation. We cannot forget what's gone on before, but maybe there's some different kind of understanding if we can do the first hard thing, which is, say, there's a lot more going on here than we're all saying.

Rebecca Schinsky (25:41)

Yeah, this is, I think, an English teacher's dream. Because you could do this stuff about connecting the fables that open each section with the themes of each section. And it's a wonderful example of how the way that good authors write a story about universal themes is to give it to ground it in very specific particular experiences. And that the specific details of these women and of how they suffered and how they struggled and the things that the mothers sacrificed for the daughters, and then the way that the daughters feel those things, those specifics are particular to these people and some of them to the immigrant experience, some of them especially to Chinese American immigrants and culture. But some of them do then hook back to universal things about mothers and daughters, about parents and children, just generational tension and the things that, like, set the background for family stories that go unsaid or go largely unacknowledged, but that everybody feels are there. And this is to get into Amy Tan a little bit both autobiographical and not like she was born in Oakland, California. In 1952. So she is a first generation immigrant. Her parents came to the US as younger people. Her dad was a pastor who came to escape the Chinese Civil War. She represents the daughter generation of the book. And she's writing about experiences inspired by things that she had growing up. Some of these are pulled directly from her own life and some of them are made up. But when she was 15, her father and her older brother both died of brain tumors within six months of each other. And her mom moved her and her younger brother to Switzerland. And while they're there, Amy Tan learns that her mother was married before in China, and that she had four children with her first husband, a son who died as a young child, and three daughters. And that her mother left the daughters in Shanghai as she was trying to get out. She had no choice, left her kids behind. And this inspires the story that kicks off the Joy Luck Club. And Tan says in the intro, like the character June, I was ignorant of my half sister's existence until my mother blurted it out during an argument. And I was instantly unmoored. No longer the only daughter, but one of four who could also be cast aside if my mother found reason. So just that underlying, like the first realization that your parents are an iceberg and you've only seen the tip of it.

Jeff O'Neill (28:14)

Yeah, that's a real moment. You know, I think we don't quite have a word for it, but you do go through a second coming of age when you realize that your parents are human, human. And they are people too. And they bring with them a full life, some good, some bad, and certainly all of it complicated. This is one of the few author biographies where the biography of the real people is wilder. It really is. Some of the stuff in the book, I mean, you didn't mention here, but at one point she tells these stories about how Amy Tan at one point held a knife to her mother's throat when they were in an argument at one point. And they put both threatened to kill each other because it is a huge, huge mess. And I wonder how much that was or wasn't in earlier editions. She thanks her editor and agent profusely. Was there a version of this that was darker than maybe Putnam was willing to pay $50,000 for to make into a cross market book? I wonder. And that's one of the things I had in mind when I was thinking about the books that come after. It definitely isn't afraid of more difficult things, but it also, I think, leaves some things on the table. For example, the daughter's Generations, their difficulties compared to what their mothers and grandfathers go through are getting divorced from kind of milquetoast dudes mostly.

Rebecca Schinsky (29:37)

Right.

Jeff O'Neill (29:37)

And leaves out a lot of the real turbulent stuff. Even Tan had her own life, and it wasn't quite ready to deal with that, or she didn't want to deal with it at the very least, or it's not included. And in reading Tan's own biography, you can see there's a lot more going on in the current generation's lives. And I think this is about the prior generations through the eyes of the second generation. But in reading Tan's biography and then thinking about her subsequent books and the books that come after, it really is more of the daughters are there for perspective on the older generations, and they don't quite have the same fullness and complexity that the mothers do. And I think I understand why. And it still works. But when I was reading Tan's biography, I was like, wow, she has a lot of her own stuff to get through that doesn't quite come through in this book.

Rebecca Schinsky (30:26)

Yeah. I think their daughter stories, as you're saying, do largely function to give us a deeper appreciation and a sense of compassion and understanding for the older generation. Because on the page, the daughters have these really difficult relationships to their moms, and they feel like nothing they do in is good enough. They don't feel seen. They don't feel supported. Like, their moms don't like their husbands, their moms don't like their boyfriends. Like, their moms are not proud of the careers that they have. Like, it's just, why is nothing I do good enough?

Jeff O'Neill (30:58)

And when you're converging, who can't drive? To quote Clula, this just feels like a lot of that. Like, it's just like. Yeah, it does, but like a stab and a twist over and over again, all of that.

Rebecca Schinsky (31:06)

Like, I mean, I'm a daughter of a mother. I have felt some of that. That's where you get the universal feeling out of specific detail. But then Tan, I maybe, in reaching to understand her own mother, gives us these mothers generations where it's like, the hard thing that one of the mothers went through is pushing a wheelbarrow for four days with children in it.

Jeff O'Neill (31:30)

It doesn't compare to, like, the arch. My architect husband maybe doesn't pay enough attention to me.

Rebecca Schinsky (31:35)

Right.

Jeff O'Neill (31:35)

It's not fun. Don't get me wrong.

Rebecca Schinsky (31:37)

Right. And how to hold all of that at the same time that, like, these are all problems. Your marriage is unhappy, and that's a problem. And your mother is not being supportive in the way that you wish she were being supportive because she has made such sacrifices, and she doesn't think you're standing up for what you're actually worth. And that's coming from this place of incredible love and sacrifice like nothing. There are some really heartbreaking things in this book, and you, like, I can't even begin to try to rank them. But the portrait of June's mother before she makes it to the US where she has to leave her children by the side of the road in order to try to save her life and theirs, in a way, is just stunning stuff. And that the daughter generations, they just. Their problems are not as capital P problem as the things their mothers felt. And, like, they will never know that as deeply as their mothers do because they've never experienced it. And also because their mothers are not, like, driving it into the ground. They don't tell them all of these stories.

Jeff O'Neill (32:41)

Yeah, neither generation sort of can do anything with that history because it's not talked about in process, and they don't have the tools to process it even if it was brought out. That it's brought out in the moment of a fight suggests, like, the guardrails were down. And that's often what happens in those moments of real tension is that things that go unsaid finally get said because the cost of doing. We're already in miserable fight. We might as well get all this stuff out onto the table.

Rebecca Schinsky (33:06)

There's a great moment where one of the daughters takes her mom to her hairstylist because mom dyes her hair at home, and the daughter is getting married and wants mom to have, like, a good hairstyle. So that's already a rich field for, like. Like, I'm telling my mom she's not good enough. Mom is feeling that. There's, like, everybody has all this shame that's just barely under the surface all the time. And the veil falls between them a little bit because the tension is already so high. And the daughter is just like, you have this hold over me. Like, I love this man. He treats me better than anything I've ever experienced in my life. Why can't you be happy for me? You make one remark, and it changes the whole way I see him. And the mom, like, starts to recognize the power she has. But at the same time, she. All she wants is for her daughter to love her and to see her and to think that what she's done is good enough to be proud to have her mom standing next to her at her wedding. However she shows up and like everybody's most like basic desires are so tangled up here and like they're both on the surface and then incredibly, just like piled up below.

Jeff O'Neill (34:13)

Their experiences are so different that it's hard for them to see each other. I think if there's a quick way of summing it up, you could do a lot worse than that.

Rebecca Schinsky (34:23)

That.

Jeff O'Neill (34:24)

And even if you see it, I think this is one of the other sort of meta points of the book. Just because you see it doesn't mean you understand it, doesn't mean you can't make it part of your own worldview because it's not just like not having it be a part of your experience. You can't excise it to see through your, your kids eyes. This thing that you carry with you, these experiences you've had, you can't see through their eyes that don't have it because they're still your own eyes. Eyes and the limits of cross identification understanding, even when people want to be seen and understood and understand and see is one of those sort of Gordian knots of being a person that I don't think we're ever going to quite figure out.

Rebecca Schinsky (35:03)

And it's like it's evidence of the mother's success at their mission to give their daughters a different kind of life, that their daughters don't understand them and can't see them and don't need to.

Jeff O'Neill (35:15)

Don'T have to have that kind of.

Rebecca Schinsky (35:16)

Like survivalist understanding are so different. But like, that doesn't make it any less painful that none of them can really reach each other. And in June's case, the character that opens the book and gets invited to join the Joy Luck Club, it's too late for her. She can only hear her mother's story through her friends and through other people now. But I was so happy to go back to this and also to realize how well it's been recognized over time that Tan won the National Humanities Medal and the Carl Sandberg Literacy award, both in 2021 in recognition of her contribute recognition of her contribution to the Got Tongue Tied to the American canon. Three more novels from her and a memoir about birding called the Batman, which is terrific.

Jeff O'Neill (36:06)

I love that. I read it. I think it came out two years ago. I really liked that book. It was really quite.

Rebecca Schinsky (36:10)

This was one of those like she continued working, but the Joy Luck Club, you come out of the gate with something that's as big as this book and it's going to be very hard for anything you do afterwards. To rise to that same thing, same level.

Jeff O'Neill (36:21)

Yeah. Let's talk about our first reading experiences. I think it was in college. 98, 99, sort of later in college, while I was rounding out my reading and I was an English and American histories, excuse me, American Studies double major. So this was right in my wheelhouse of things that I wanted to know about. It came out when I was 11, so I was too young to pick it up at the time. And then by the time I was 15, 16, 17, it was like a book club book that had sort of a Vaseline lens adaptation that felt. I don't know. I don't know. I think I watched the adaptation a lot later and it's much better than I remembered. I guess it had a little much of a How do you remember how to make an American quilt? When that came out, there was that generation of, like, soft focus stories that were super feelings. Let me just say, when I was 16, that's not what I was looking for. And that's about me, not about the works of art. But when I came to read it a lot later, it wasn't the book I thought it was. It wasn't. We use book club book to mean several different things. There is a version of the book club book that I'm glad exists and I hope people like, but it's not for me. That is a pretty conventional family drama about things that happen, and that's not what this book is and never has been. So that's when I first experienced it.

Rebecca Schinsky (37:36)

One of my stray thoughts reading this was that the packaging and that the publisher continued to run with positioning the book this way is so smart and so, so stealthy because this is a perfect gateway drug into literary writing and darker, more serious topics for the book club crowd. If you pick this up, thinking that it's going to be similar to more of, like, the popular book club fiction, you have some surprises in store.

Jeff O'Neill (37:59)

Yes, you do.

Rebecca Schinsky (38:00)

The fables and folklore are difficult or can be difficult. Like, what is this doing here? Following the threads of all of the different mothers and daughters can be challenging. The subject matter is certainly heavy and it's kind of surprising that it has had the life that it's had, but in a really wonderful way. I read this, I think, in 1993 or 94. Like when the movie was bigger.

Jeff O'Neill (38:23)

You were too young.

Rebecca Schinsky (38:25)

Yeah, I was way too young. I was seven when the book came out. But by 93, 94, this is when the Oprah Book Club is starting. And folks who listen to this show for a While will come to understand how important Oprah was in my early adolescent reading life. I don't know if I saw this was not an Oprah Book Club book, but I don't know if I saw Amy Tan go on Oprah or if it was just in the water at the time. I was way, way too young. And then this was the first time that I revisited it since then.

Jeff O'Neill (38:55)

You know what? That's an interesting question. Cause Oprah started the book Club in what, 92, is that right?

Rebecca Schinsky (39:01)

94.

Jeff O'Neill (39:02)

94. Oprah almost certainly read this book. And I wonder if reading this book and the popularity of it had something to do with wanting to have a book club on the thing on her. Doesn't it feel like she's like, oh, I want to talk about books like this? I can kind of see it.

Rebecca Schinsky (39:17)

It's the Bridges of Madison county, which we will have to do an episode on someday that really does that. Oprah breaks that book just by interviewing the author and talking about it on the show. It goes bananas. And a year or so after that happened, organically, it was when Oprah started her book club.

Jeff O'Neill (39:34)

Yeah. Interesting. What's it like to read? We've talked a lot about the actual reading experience here. Do you want me to clear out for mother daughter stuff, Rebecca? I don't know what we like to do for that.

Rebecca Schinsky (39:46)

Oh, man. It's just masterful how well she captures the mother daughter thing. And now I'm in my early 40s, my mom is in her early 70s, and we've had some of the kinds of conversations that these women did not get to have with their mothers. So to be able to see a little bit more of the iceberg that's below the surface and to appreciate that through the lens of fiction like this is really powerful. But then the layers of immigrant experience and cultural tension, I just thought Tan captured the emotion of it so wonderfully. Like these women, the daughters are all in awe of their mothers. They're all afraid of their mothers. They all want to please their mothers at the same time that they chafe against the moms, what they perceive as overbearing advice. They want to be loved by them. The mothers are afraid to open up to them. Everybody has expectations that are unsaid. Everybody has guilt. Everybody is so, so much shame. There's like, fear and hypervigilance and pain and suffering. But then somehow the thing that shines the brightest around all of it is this huge sense of hope that the act of coming to the US Is hopeful and the act of Becoming a parent is fundamentally an act of hope and an investment in the future. And that Tan can write about such very difficult dark things and leave the book feeling hopeful is a real magic trick. Like that's very hard to do. And I was really in awe of that.

Jeff O'Neill (41:20)

I've always found it difficult to. You can understand with your head but it's harder to understand with my heart. Books that come out of real honor or shame based cultures because I don't have that experience. Right. Like that's I'm American through Protestantism brings its own thing but it doesn't have quite the kind of shame and guilt and you're going to be ostracized. And I have the American bootstrapping. Well, I can go out and make it on my own even if I live my village or my town or my church or whatever. And this is one of the few books where I'm never going to get it because I don't come out of this. I don't breathe the air they're breathing. So I can't quite get it all the way into my lungs. But this is one of the few books where. Where it kind of starts to. I can feel the weight of it. I can sort of identify with the weight of it. And some of that is how embedded and it comes through in very small ways and it's the multi factor piece of it as well. But I think ultimately it's a thing is that the daughters don't have the same access to these. The repercussions of being ostracized. The repercussions very real material lifelong ones of marrying, you know, becoming the fourth wife of someone or you know, having someone say something about you or being thrown out by the family that you married into because you couldn't have the right kind of kid on the right timeline. This is one where because it's shown in contrast with the daughter generation's lack of understanding I felt like I could understand. I was like I could see what they couldn't see of how much of the money others survival tactics in China don't really apply in America. And they're trying to apply things that don't apply or don't have to apply in the same way to a new context. And no wonder everyone is confused and feeling out of sorts because they're using this survival mechanism that got them here. But this place once here has a whole other world of problems they have to deal with in different kinds of ways.

Rebecca Schinsky (43:19)

Right? Yeah. And I don't know if Amy Tan was trying to do this in telling the story or if it's just a wonderful, wonderful knock on effect of it. But one of the ways that you bust stereotypes about groups of people is by giving texture and dimension to the experience. And the, the mother generation carries a lot of what we, especially in like 80s and 90s American pop culture saw as like the tiger mom, like real stereotypical depictions of Asian women. But by showing us where they came from, it's like, oh, oh. There's a reason that these women feel that they need to be because if.

Jeff O'Neill (43:54)

You don't do this right, you're gonna have to leave your kids by the side of the road in a wheelbarrow. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but that could. What's gonna happen if you're not paying attention?

Rebecca Schinsky (44:02)

Yeah, it's just an incredible way to capture, I think the multi generational lens is an incredible way to tell this kind of story. And in addition to doing that, within each mother daughter pair, Tan captures the dynamics of a close knit group of friends. These people have known each other for decades and, and like there's real deep knowing of each other and real care, but there's also competition and pettiness and resentment and gossip and all of the things that can come along with trying to evolve alongside a group of other people that you love and feel loyal to, but you're not always in step with. And I found the way that she did that to be really masterful as well.

Jeff O'Neill (44:44)

You have a great quote. I think that sums it up as well as anything we talk about here from Lindo Zhang. I wanted my children to have the best combination, American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix? And I think that's one of the questions of the books. Like, do they not mix? Or can you just, if you can say these are different, let's take the pieces that we want to take. I wonder about that because there's no meta discourse beyond this about, okay, how can we move forward holding both things as possibilities? We want heritage and possibility. We want to be free of social circumscription, but we also want to keep some core values at the same time. This is a conversation we have in my nuclear family here at home about what values do we have? How do we express those values? When is it hard? What do we have to give up? What are in conflict with each other? But there's a sense that these two things are oil and water, at least in this particular quotation. But I think the book ultimately ends up in a slightly different place. I don't think it's quite. There's a perfect way to put them together. If you just do it this way, it's all fine and dandy. But I don't think the book ends with the idea that the idea of a Chinese character and American culture are opposites. But they may be more like a yin and a yang, which we get throughout the book in different combinations as well. They are. You know, they each have their trade offs. If you take them one particular way, the worst of both intersecting is disastrous. But is there a positive version of that? And I think it's sort of gesturing towards that. Rebecca, do you have a sense of that?

Rebecca Schinsky (46:19)

Yeah, I think that there's sort of an underlying hope and faith here that the following generations will do this more.

Jeff O'Neill (46:26)

Effectively because they read this book. I mean, not to put to. But like. But because of representations like this.

Rebecca Schinsky (46:31)

Yes. And we'll have the conversations that these women don't get to have with their mothers because so much goes unsaid that you can't figure out what the blend is. It's just the mother saying, I want you to be more Chinese and more obedient. And the American daughters who feel themselves to be American, American, you know, they like that is a strong portion of their identity. You want that independence and agency. And there was no template. These people don't have language for it. They are the first generation that they know to move here from China. They find each other as strangers. But as their daughters grow up, like, one of the things that I thought about a lot was, what if there were an update of this where the women who were daughters in this book are the mothers in the next book and we get them and their children. And I think we would see more of that blending. That is, I think, one of the pieces of hopefulness Tan is writing into.

Jeff O'Neill (47:20)

Yeah. Again, to read it again. I remember the Joy Luck Club within, like the social circle being as more of a hub. And like, you go out and then sort of come back. And maybe that's just reading books that do something similar later. That's just one of the things that I didn't remember. There's that. I think my favorite scene in the book might be when she's introduced to the Joy Luck Club and she's trying to parse who's who and the relationship. And they've gone from gambling to buying stock. And it's almost like the first scene in the Godfather where you see there's this shadow government or shadow social system set up for people who don't have the same access to it that others in American culture do at the time. But they found a way. And because of the. I don't want to be grandiose here, but because of American social structure, there's some room to maneuver in a different way. It's not totally free, don't get me wrong. There's all kinds of biases and things going on, but they found and created a pocket within this larger American culture in which they can forge for themselves a new kind of relationship. Because you say it's not a church, it's not a business. It has rules. Weirdly, it has bylaws for what you can and can't do. There's money involved. But I found it just an interesting and fascinating way to be in community with other people. That's not just potluck dinners, but it also isn't sort of your hobby board. Sort of somewhere between the two of.

Rebecca Schinsky (48:38)

Them, literally invested in each other's lives.

Jeff O'Neill (48:40)

Yes, yes, I said before, it's not afraid to let the readers do the work of remembering names and dynamics and timelines. That feels to me quite modern, contemporary. Still, it comes out of. I mean, Morrison is doing something similar. It's not quite as difficult as some of the things, but, like, not spoon feeding you, okay, this person is this person's daughter, and we're gonna use an Americanized name because it's easier to remember. Like, Right. She's put it all out there.

Rebecca Schinsky (49:04)

Like, it's deeply feminist. And I think one of the reasons that it's so successful in being as feminist and sort of, like, underlyingly political as it is is that Tan is so good at showing that she doesn't ever have to say, she's so good at showing us how unvalued these women are, especially in China, and how they like how that impacted them and then what that means for what they want for their daughters and how their daughters struggle in their own careers and their own relations, relationships with men to figure out their own identities and express their worth. And their mothers are, like, pushing them and advocating in their own way for, know your worth, be able to be independent, be successful. You can be a prodigy, all of that stuff.

Jeff O'Neill (49:49)

Yes.

Rebecca Schinsky (49:49)

But, like, nobody has a conversation about feminism. Nobody has a conversation about, you're a girl and you can do things. And it's so much better for girls in America than it was in China. And I think that if Tan wrote more of that on the page, like, maybe it sells to a slightly more mainstream audience, but it does not have the literary impact and the enduring legacy that it has this way.

Jeff O'Neill (50:15)

Yeah. Cause certainly the mothers don't have. They don't have access to first wave or second wave feminism. They have no interest or not interest. They just know what it's. And the daughters, I should say here, are a little bit older than sometimes you get in these kinds of representations. Sometimes you get people who are in like the earlier degree, mid-20s. These daughters are grown, like grown grown. They've had multiple husbands and multiple careers. They've lived away. I think that's interesting to think about too, that these, the readers of this book, as we know in America at least, it's sort of 40 year old white women are the core of the book club commercial fiction reading population. You think about who the 40 year old women were in 1989, they were college students in the 60s. So they were the first of this sort of post 60s generation to think differently about some of these issues. The work continues, but the readers maybe had more language than the mothers did to understand and see what was happening and think through those terms. I remember and I think maybe I did read it for a class because I remember there was some criticism of the betrayal of Chinese and Chinese American men. But in this. And I don't remember just that they're all terrible and they're doing terrible things for representations of men in these cultures. And they're not really bad here. There's one bad one for sure, but there more are felt as begone, absent or detached. They're more absences than presences. Again, there is one notable exception that I don't want to glide over. But you know, like most of these kinds of criticisms, it really is missing the point. So that's something that I was struck again by. It's hard to even remember the male characters again, save for one. And that I think is part of what Tan is doing, and I think that's an interesting investigation, is how, you know, June's own father is going through a decline and he's a widower and he is then defined by his wife's absence as much as his own presence. So anyway, and I said the very spare language. You're not going to be pulling out a lot of beautiful sentences necessarily. I didn't find myself struck by particular turns of phrase. This is not meant as a backhanded compliment or something else. Hemingway and others do similar things. There is a time and place for this and first novels often are more like this. I think Tan is trying to be so attuned to the interpersonal dynamics, that saying it pretty straight gets the job done. It's direct but indirect, if that makes sense. And depth of feeling is generally more sensed than shown. And I think you can do that by not gilding the lily, not adding the adjective, not earning the turn of the phrase. You can almost feel some of the sentences are meant to sort of linger for a moment, which I think is really fascinating. Stray thoughts, Rebecca.

Rebecca Schinsky (53:02)

Let's see. Stray thoughts. Oh, I lost my notes.

Jeff O'Neill (53:08)

I'll go. You can go. Okay. If this is structured like a novel. I kept thinking about Pachinko because Pachinko is one of my personal favorites. Like, and it has a of lot, lot of. Again, it's about different cultures. It's Korean America, Korea, Japan in America. But you get multi generational and you get into sort of pre modern Korean culture all the way up through 80s and 90s American culture and sort of trying to. It's bridging multiple gaps. So it's sort of. It's swimming in similar waters. I'm trying to say what. But it is not totally straightforward. But it's more of a coherent singular narrative where you have. It's more of a family epic. I guess what I'm trying to say.

Rebecca Schinsky (53:51)

Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (53:51)

I mean this is more of a family epic.

Rebecca Schinsky (53:53)

Hundred pages long.

Jeff O'Neill (53:54)

Yeah. Well this could be epic where you start like the grandmothers in like 1918. Like we get those bits and pieces. If you go kind of more that direction. Is this successful? That's not rhetorical. I wonder. Because I think you're right. There's a strength of it. But then, you know, the big family drama has its own, own weight. I just found. That was just a straight thought. I don't have a good answer.

Rebecca Schinsky (54:15)

It's a good question. And I don't think you can separate those two books from the timelines and the cultures that they came out into that if Amy Tan had submitted a 600 page novel about Chinese American mothers and daughters in 1987, I don't think this happens. But that it's taught that it's pretty direct, that you don't need to like the history that surrounds it is not intimidating. You don't need to do. I mean you couldn't Google in the book.

Jeff O'Neill (54:43)

The Korean Japan stuff is much more complicated.

Rebecca Schinsky (54:45)

Yeah, but that Amy Tan had sold so well certainly opens the door for writers like Min Jin Lee to come in and to tell multi generational stories about Asian and Asian American experiences. And to know that like you can point to a history of readership for those in I think it's a similar kind of reader that's drawn to the Joy Luck Club and to pachinko. But you can't do. I don't think you can get to pachinko without the Joy Lunch Luck Club first.

Jeff O'Neill (55:14)

No. Another stray thought it has a lot less actually about American racism. There's some like, very small moments. But I was ready for it to be much more about how difficult it was to be a Chinese immigrant in the US in the 50s and 60s than it was. They certainly had their difficulties. But the presence of white American racism is not the boogeyman here, though I'm sure it was in these people's rights real lives. That's not the point of this book. That's not what she's interested in.

Rebecca Schinsky (55:46)

It's much more about gender. It's much more about what it is.

Jeff O'Neill (55:49)

Much more about gender. Absolutely.

Rebecca Schinsky (55:51)

I think I said mine already. It was just that this is a really. It's a good, stealthy gateway drug for the book club crowd. And I think the life of this book is totally different if the publisher doesn't glom onto let's call it a novel. If you market this as a collection of short stories, it's probably closer to the lifespan that Amy Tan expected it to have. And that's not to say anything about its quality.

Jeff O'Neill (56:14)

Just that marketing, short stories, marketing and packaging can matter. There's a fractured element to this. I kept thinking about the end where there's this moment that I'm seeing as hopeful. It's not a full reconciliation, it's not a healing. But these children of a mother who had to do extraordinary things for her and them to survive, who is now gone, come together and take a picture of each of themselves with a poet. And they see in them together a portrait of their mother. Right. Very moving, very beautiful. Nice use of the Polaroid camera. And what kind of reconciliation in that? And I think Tan. I see Tan not trying to speak for prior generations, but she is trying to see them. I think the fractured nature of her understanding. She's reckoning with the fact that's as well as she. She can do to see them in pieces, to see them as parts of a whole. But she's never going to grok to use Robert A. Heinlein. Stranger in a Strange Land, I guess, was another one we should get to eventually. Someday. She is coming to terms with the gap between who they are and what she understands them to be. And that can still be positive and generative, but it's real. And I think an Extended first person portrait of say if Tan wrote autofiction of her mother, wrote along that same epic I was just asking about from her mother's point of view as the Fulcrum character, I think that doesn't capture part of the brokenness that Tan is trying to capture. She is not saying there's a place of total healing, but brokenness is a part of it. But what's possible after you realize that that's fascinating to me. Quotes. I have a bunch, as always. Why don't you lead off with some that you want to get into the air.

Rebecca Schinsky (58:07)

One of them mothers saying, all these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly, now my daughter does not see me. And I want to tell her this. We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others. And that's kind of the thesis statement for the whole book, I think.

Jeff O'Neill (58:30)

Yes. Well, especially when you think of. Of the world of the women in China. They are very subscribed to what they're allowed to do and not to. But we get several scenes of where they find agency within those cages. And part of it is to misrepresent their own desires and beings. And the thing, especially when she makes up this dream to try to get out of her marriage. Oh yeah, right. And so she lies about what the dream is. Cause she needs to have agency. But part and parcel of all that is a kind of dispute, deception. And they learn. And this has come through in the. The extended chest metaphor, which you have some nice words about to say in a minute, which is a lot of it is about faints and not saying what you actually want and what you actually think so that you're not held to it and people can't use it to against you. Well, that's a survival technique. And it turns out when you're trying to have real open, honest relationship with people, that is not a way forward. Rebecca, you know, like that that is not going to help you get to the next place. The thing that you got you here is not going to help you in the next place. And I think that's something that the mother's generation starts to see. They don't know what's next necessarily, but they're starting to articulate it in these moments of like, ah, yes, there's something going on here that's a consequence of how I behave and how I've operated.

Rebecca Schinsky (59:42)

Right. Yeah, they're just starting to crack it open in One of the fables, this is said, then you must teach my daughter the same lesson, how to lose your innocence, but not your hope.

Jeff O'Neill (59:53)

Quite beautiful.

Rebecca Schinsky (59:53)

Yeah, That's. And also a thesis statement of the book that is definitely what the mothers have sought to do. Like, they lost their innocence outside of their own choices. They didn't have agency over the things that happened to them, but they have retained hope. They have moved across the world, they have started families, they have created a community, all out of a deep desire and belief that they can give their.

Jeff O'Neill (60:18)

Daughters something else and are really well spotted, actually gorgeous. Because one thing that feels more apparent in Tan's biography, her and her mother's real lives, that doesn't appear here is a sense of despair. Like, it feels like there were moments of real despair in Tan's life and her mother's life. And how could there not be? Even in the you got to leave your kid by the road scene. That is. It's not. It's not portrayed, maybe you disagree as being despair, but of, like, just tactical. Like, this is the best thing I can do in this moment and to make that move is about the possibility that it might work. It might actually work to pin some money to my kids and leave them there. And you know what? God damn it. It did.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (60:59)

It did.

Jeff O'Neill (61:00)

But in Tan's own sort of biography and interviews, and especially how she talks about her mother's difficulty, it feels like there was more despair there and that just wasn't included.

Rebecca Schinsky (61:09)

Yeah. And it's not that those experiences are without consequences for these women.

Jeff O'Neill (61:14)

No, no, no.

Rebecca Schinsky (61:14)

Yeah. Like, we see one who's lost a child. We see them that she has, like, deep depressions and can't really function or engage in her family life. We see little bits of it with all of the mothers, how they suffer in the present day because of the suffering that they experienced in the past. But that hope lays underneath of all of their choices and continues to guide their behavior. And they can't quite express that to their daughters, that it's hopefulness. And their daughters haven't experienced it as their mother's hope. They've experienced it as. As pressure. And I think that that's the central tension of the story is the mothers are saying, I did all of this because I saw this possibility for you, and I saw this hope that you could have a better life. And the daughters are pushing back on. All you ever did was pressure me to play chess more or to be a piano prodigy or whatever it was that they don't understand where it came from that, the kernel of that is this hope and this belief. Also like, why did I push my children in a wheelbarrow? Why did I leave them by the side of the road? If not for you to have something so like, by God, you better go on and have something better, right?

Jeff O'Neill (62:21)

Yeah. And this is, kind of connects a couple of things we just said. This is another quote. She learned these things, but I couldn't teach her about Chinese character. How to obey parents and listen to your mother's mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it but never flash it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best and that how you can take advantage of cheap opportunities. This is wonderful sort of Machiavelli advice for the culture in the society in which they operate. But in the society in which their daughters find themselves again, there are limitations in glass ceilings and biases and prejudice, but the opportunities are more. You can go to college and you can become an architect and you can do these sorts of things and they have their own things you have to navigate. But it's not about waiting in the weeds so you can jump out or leave or run away at a particular time.

Rebecca Schinsky (63:14)

And one of their husbands, even part of the reason he leaves her is that she won't express what she wants. She's been constantly. One of the daughters is just constantly defers to him for what do you want for dinner? Where do you want to go on vacation? How do you want our lives to be? And at a certain point he just can't take it anymore. Like you tell me, you make a choice, what do you want? That. That like subjugation of your own desires that helps the mothers survive is a costly strategy for the daughters.

Jeff O'Neill (63:41)

There's one metaphor that I caught and I couldn't. I can't quite parse it, so I'll just put it here. Here all of us are like stairs. One step after another going up and down, but all going the same way. But if someone's going the other way on stairs, they're literally going the opposite way.

Rebecca Schinsky (64:00)

But the stairway connects the same stairs.

Jeff O'Neill (64:02)

But the stair connects. But yeah, I'm not trying to say it's a bad metaphor. I'm trying to. My understanding of it is poor, but there's a. I guess that it does connect a shared space. But they're at cross purpose somehow that even if they're on the same stairs, it's meaningfully different to go up and down.

Rebecca Schinsky (64:18)

Yeah. I mean it feels Escheresque. Kind of those Escher staircases where you can be on it but like one of you is upside down and seeing things from a different perspective. A lot of chess metaphors happening.

Jeff O'Neill (64:31)

A lot of chess metaphors. Yes.

Rebecca Schinsky (64:33)

One of the daughters is a chess champion who overtly talks about having to play against her mother navigate her relationship with her mother strategically like it's a game of chess. There's. There's a lot of that. What do you have going on on here with the piano?

Jeff O'Neill (64:46)

Well this is. That's what literature's metaphor. I had. You already had chess. Which is probably the best one. The piano right Is like you can be a genius. We're going to buy you this piano and we're going to make you love it and then you're not going to love it and you're going to rebel against it but then we're ultimately going to try to give it to you as a gift that you'll honor but you won't accept but you will have the piano tuned. I just thought all in that whole the miasma of interpersonal dynamics around that of piece piano are a pretty good encapsulation of the dynamics at play here and that it just sort of sits in the room and everyone knows the dynamics around that piano even if they can't articulate in a particular moment and no one wants to get rid of has value at the same time. Very very tangly stuff. Rebecca is the joy luck club for you. If.

Rebecca Schinsky (65:34)

If you are into or down to deal with non linear structure. If you're interested in a work that opened the door for a lot of writers working today. Like I don't know how fresh this feels to a reader in 2025 because it laid the groundwork for so many future writers and like this is the maybe not if the mother daughter shit is heavy. So that's just. You gotta take your own temperature for violence sexual assault.

Jeff O'Neill (66:05)

There's some other heavy dynamics at the same place.

Rebecca Schinsky (66:08)

Definitely worth Google on the trigger warnings the details of those because there is a lot of difficult stuff here.

Jeff O'Neill (66:17)

I didn't really know how to put this in maybe for you if and we haven't talked about this but it's mine was 324 pages and I flew through it a very. I always use the word enjoyable. That doesn't feel right but it was easy and I found myself wanting to keep going and it was not fun to keep going.

Rebecca Schinsky (66:34)

It's not Breezy but it doesn't feel. This one did not feel like homework to me. The reading we've done for the show has felt like, all right, like, saddle up, you know, make sure my dictionary is ready. But you can't let the story wash over you. But it doesn't feel very effortful, which is also a great trick on Tan's part.

Jeff O'Neill (66:54)

Yes. And I do think the breaking it up maybe helps with that. There's sort of chapter, you're on to the next, and you move around, kind of keeps. Keeps the balls in the air. The immortal questions that art asks, which of these are primary here? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil? I think if we think of what do I owe my neighbor as being ethics writ large, that's probably the primary. How do I be with my family? How do I be with the people?

Rebecca Schinsky (67:23)

And what is the good life? Their mothers have come in search of a certain kind of good life. The daughters are defining the good life in a different way for themselves. Are those things in competition with each other, or is one an evolution of the other? I think that is a fundamental question here.

Jeff O'Neill (67:38)

Yeah. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing?

Rebecca Schinsky (67:41)

I'm not totally sure on the first.

Jeff O'Neill (67:43)

How so?

Rebecca Schinsky (67:44)

On the first? I mean, it doesn't feel like it's about art and writing.

Jeff O'Neill (67:47)

There's not writers in. Well, there are writers, copywriters, ad writers.

Rebecca Schinsky (67:50)

But there are these fables that open this story, and it's about storytelling or, like, the consequences, maybe.

Jeff O'Neill (67:57)

I was gonna go stories and storytelling. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Rebecca Schinsky (68:01)

But this is also a debut novel. Tan had not been writing for very long when she wrote this, so she. I don't think she had been stewing in, like, what.

Jeff O'Neill (68:09)

She has a lot of takes on writing as she was getting this one out the door. Fascinating. There is a Signal adaptation. Could you get the most of the gist? Most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation?

Rebecca Schinsky (68:21)

Yeah, I watched it last night, and it feels like an early 90s Oliver Stone movie, Like a big movie for grownups, which I miss this kind of movie. So, like, that was one thing. You can definitely get the gist. They make some changes to the structure, but you get the heart of the story. The cultural depictions feel a little dated now, and if characters were written this way in 2025, we might talk about them as Being insensitive or stereotypical, which I think is an indication that stories like Joy Luck Club expanded the conversation about Chinese American women, about Asian immigrants in general, and have continued to push so that depictions have become even more textured and nuanced. But it feels like it's 35 years old and I don't think that's bad. It was a good 2 hours and 15 minutes. The book also, though, is so wonderful. Don't watch the movie instead of reading the book.

Jeff O'Neill (69:23)

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He went on to direct Blue in the Face, which was a co director with the author Paul Auster. I've never heard of that book before. And then he went on a run of sort of making 90s movies, I think anywhere but here in the center of the world. Wait, this wasn't directed by Oliver Stone, was it?

Rebecca Schinsky (69:42)

He produced it.

Jeff O'Neill (69:44)

Oh, produced it. The director was Wayne Wang. So a different person. But then who directed Made in Manhattan a little bit later for you rom com fans, which I didn't know until I looked this up. The budget was ten and a half million dollars and it tripled the budget as you said before. But. But I don't think we talked about the budget.

Rebecca Schinsky (70:00)

It did great. That's a real, It's a real box office win.

Jeff O'Neill (70:03)

Yeah, I didn't watch. I do remember. I have seen it. I remember it being a fairly decent version at the time. But I always am going to say with this, this story, like many others, feelings are in feelings. And books are best for feelings. They just are. Books are better for feelings. I don't think I'd do another adaptation of this over more modern stories. That's where I landed on movie, musical, TV series or Muppets though I think someone could take a crack at a musical because there would be interesting scenes.

Rebecca Schinsky (70:31)

That's interesting. I didn't spend much time thinking about it as a musical. I agree with you here. I would not advocate for a remake of Joy Luck Club over some more contemporary stories. If they were going to do it, I would want to see a series about the later generations continuing this evolution of these women's stories.

Jeff O'Neill (70:50)

Miscellaneous trivias, adaptation rumors, misattributed quotes, et cetera. We've talked about some of these. I picked. Here's the two most popular quotes on Goodreads. I like to go do this.

Rebecca Schinsky (70:59)

Let's hear it.

Jeff O'Neill (71:00)

The first, the most popular by a factor of like three. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.

Rebecca Schinsky (71:08)

Ah, same thing. We talked about a little. Yeah. All right. Glad to know that's the most popular one.

Jeff O'Neill (71:12)

And the second one. Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?

Rebecca Schinsky (71:16)

Okay. Shocking that that's not the most popular one.

Jeff O'Neill (71:19)

Yeah. Cause that's the one that feels complicated. But it's actually. No, not is not merely that, by the way. No, no, no, it's not.

Rebecca Schinsky (71:27)

This was. We mentioned Louise Erdrich at the top, but Amy Tan was inspired by the format of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. And so I guess in your read alikes those books are kind of nothing alike. But if you're just curious about the starting threads of things, you could go pick up Love Medicine. I think what happens to this book if it's marketed as short stories is just a wild alternate universe.

Jeff O'Neill (71:49)

Right. In the form of relative popularity. It's about six times as popular as her next most popular book, which is the Bonesetter's Daughter. Again, if you're using Goodread ratings as a proxy, it's the worst we have. Except for all the others.

Rebecca Schinsky (71:59)

But like when you start at the top of the mountain with your debut like this.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (72:03)

Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (72:03)

It's incredible.

Jeff O'Neill (72:05)

Hot takes. You did some you want to do. I've got one more that I haven't seen.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (72:08)

Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (72:09)

Let's hear yours already.

Jeff O'Neill (72:10)

Is Amy Tan responsible for the X female job title? The X's job title formulation. So the Bonesetter's Daughter. Even to the point where Wonder Boy sort of parodies in the Arsonist's Daughter. We get so many of these that becomes a joke later. And I don't know, she does two of them.

Rebecca Schinsky (72:30)

Yeah. And then we like decades later we get the Tiger's Wife by Taya Obrecht like launches another round of them and now it's gone.

Jeff O'Neill (72:37)

Because you can't name your thing that. Because everyone thinks it's a cliche to. Anyway, I just.

Rebecca Schinsky (72:43)

It'll come back around.

Jeff O'Neill (72:44)

It'll come back around. Yeah. It's not a heights, but the title works. I think the title does a lot of work to get people interested and help them remember it. If the book wasn't good, it wouldn't matter. But that the title works and is memorable. I think it's hard to underrate and you're trying to figure out what's going to happen.

Rebecca Schinsky (73:03)

It sounds like it's going to be a pleasant read. The Joy Love Club.

Jeff O'Neill (73:06)

Yeah. Yeah. Read alikes. I said pachinko. And then I think the more literary award winning version of this we get 11 years later is the Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. A book was one of our shared favorites of all time. And then really to go to a more modern one, kind of like you were saying everything I never told you'd or Celeste Ng. You could go to many of her books. And I think those are all in their own ways progeny of the Joy Luck Club.

Rebecca Schinsky (73:34)

Yeah. For like more classic book club types of fiction. A little more contemporary. Jamie Ford has made a career on this. The Hotel on the Corner. Bitter and Sweet is his debut novel. But he's written several more. Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese is a graphic novel.

Jeff O'Neill (73:50)

That's a great pick. That's wonderful. I wish.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (73:52)

Right.

Rebecca Schinsky (73:53)

About these kinds of multigenerational experiences and stories. And then my Jhumpa Lahiri pick was the namesake for multi generational immigrant family story. But interpreter of Maladies is my Jhumpa Lahiri goat. So I want to.

Jeff O'Neill (74:04)

That's just because of short stories. Right?

Rebecca Schinsky (74:05)

Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (74:06)

If we're arguing about which is a short story versus which is a story.

Rebecca Schinsky (74:08)

A lot of directions to go if you like the Joy Luck Club. And of course you can pick up.

Jeff O'Neill (74:11)

Amy Tan's other work Cocktail Party Crib Sheet. Rebecca, I think you best articulated most of these already. Do you want to take another? Let's sum up and get them into a meal.

Rebecca Schinsky (74:22)

Just fundamentally about the complexity of mother daughter relationships and the tension between rejecting your mother's perspective, seeking independence and realizing and appreciating your mother's wisdom on the other side of that tension. And that what looks like rigidity and adherence to old fashioned ways of being can actually be a manifestation of deep and unexpressible love. Unexpressible and unexpressed. That the children can never fully appreciate and understand the sacrifices that their parents made for them. Just because you just cannot embody that experience your parents had. But especially the depth and difficulty of the things that the mothers go through here. But I think if you're looking for one sound bite nugget for this book, it's that motherhood and immigration are both acts of great hope that bring with them great fear and anxiety and great love. So how do you hold the hope and not be sunk by the fear.

Jeff O'Neill (75:16)

Yeah. Not be subject to it at the same time. I think that's the trickiest part. Our final beat. Our zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest. Our five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read, cred and oh, damn factor. Interesting. These are all. When we get to these at the end, I'm like, oh, this is an interesting one. Have I ever said, ah, this is straightforward and not. Not at all interesting historical importance. I've said a lot about the modern version of this in terms of a lot of what's happened in the last 30 to 40 years of contemporary American literature. Feels like it flows, goes through, at least in part, the Joy Luck Club. So I have a hard time saying less than six.

Rebecca Schinsky (75:59)

Yeah. I would give it a six or a seven.

Jeff O'Neill (76:01)

Yeah. Okay. Readability. Nine.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:04)

Yeah, it's super readable.

Jeff O'Neill (76:06)

Yeah. It would only be a 10 if it was like funnier or there's less difficult things. That readability is really about how quickly your eyes want to move over the words. For me, maybe if I use that, maybe it's more of an 8 because it's not, you know, the fables do.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:20)

Complicate it a little bit.

Jeff O'Neill (76:22)

Yeah. And there's hard things. There's hard things and it's sometimes difficult to keep straight what timeline you're on, what relationship you're in and what happened when you returned to that relationship 73 years ago.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:31)

I drew myself a family tree with notes about whose mother had which background experience. Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (76:37)

Current relevance of central questions. I mean, it's never au current, but it never goes away, these questions. So kind of a 10.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:42)

Yeah, we'd go with nine.

Jeff O'Neill (76:45)

Sure. Book nerd read credit. I have no sense of this.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:50)

I think it's underrated today because so many other books stand on its shoulders.

Jeff O'Neill (76:56)

If it's underrated, it would mean people would not give you credit for reading it. So that means it'd be low.

Rebecca Schinsky (77:00)

It's low. Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (77:01)

But versus what it should be is, I guess, attention.

Rebecca Schinsky (77:04)

It should be high. Yeah. I think it's probably like a four or a five. Yeah, yeah, five.

Jeff O'Neill (77:11)

Oh, damn factor. This is that unexpressible je ne sais quoi that tries to capture our experience of like being surprised or wowed by the book or major pieces of it. It's sneakier when you. I think at any given moment I'm less wowed. But as I think about the totality and that final image and some of the scenes and how it's structured, I have a great appreciation for the large design of how this is put together.

Rebecca Schinsky (77:39)

And I've read a lot of books about the complexity of mother daughter relationships.

Jeff O'Neill (77:44)

All right, talk about that. So how much? Oh, damn. Yeah. Is this as good as it gets?

Rebecca Schinsky (77:49)

Yeah, this is about as good as it gets. Especially because no one is sitting around at lunch being like, if only my mom and I could understand each other. If only my daughter knew that. But Tan just I've said it already, but that she shows so much more than she tells and she does it so well. And then that this is someone's debut novel and not a debut after like 30 years of trying to get published. A debut after writing at all for like three years.

Jeff O'Neill (78:24)

Very good number.

Rebecca Schinsky (78:25)

It gives stuff.

Jeff O'Neill (78:25)

Quantify everything you just said into a single digit. Rebecca come on. 8. Not going to fight you.

Rebecca Schinsky (78:33)

Great.

Jeff O'Neill (78:35)

We are going to stick around. For those of you who subscribe to the office hours level of our Patreon, which you can find@patreon.com 02Wellred to things we didn't get to Additional Quotes Stray Matter. You can follow us on the socials. Zero to well read podcasts, Instagram, TikTok, those kinds of places. Shoot us an email 02 well read.com thanks to thriftbooks for sponsoring again this season of zero to well read. Go to thriftbooks.com I bet you can find some interesting additions. There's a 30th anniversary edition that has an introduction by Amy Tan. If you're going to go get one, get that one.

Rebecca Schinsky (79:09)

Get that one. Yeah, it's good.

Jeff O'Neill (79:11)

And finally, zero to well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much.