Books, Arts & Manners: Chinoiserie

HARDLY had I finished reviewing M. Butterfly, when already several other Chinese or Chinese-American movies were upon us. Take The Joy Luck Club, based on Amy Tan’s bestseller about four women who regularly get together to play mahjong. They were all born in China but now five in San Francisco, and each trails behind her a dread past. Each also has a daughter for whom she harbors high hopes for a good American life. And all four women had, in their murky Chinese histories, mothers whose positions were inferior even to their daughters’, yet who fought tenaciously for their girl children.

At once you will perceive a rather too fearful symmetry in those fearsome foursomes. It takes four to play mahjong, which is how Miss Tan must have gotten the idea to do everything foursquarely by fours. Yet however this may work in the wider scope and statelier pace of the novel, a movie— even a two-and-a-half-hour one-cannot bear this much freight. The Joy Luck Club must juggle the stories of four grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and, to make it a baker’s dozen, a pair of sisters, whom their mother had to abandon in China, and whom, years later, their American half-sister, June, comes to fetch to America. To make this meeting more tearjerking, the elderly sisters expected to see their and June’s mother, but learn now that Mother died recently, and that half-sister June is all they get. Tears of joy proliferate nevertheless, and the movie ends awash in liquid sentiment.

JS

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John Simon

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HARDLY had I finished reviewing M. Butterfly, when already several other Chinese or Chinese-American movies were upon us. Take The Joy Luck Club, based on Amy Tan’s bestseller about four women who regularly get together to play mahjong. They were all born in China but now five in San Francisco, and each trails behind her a dread past. Each also has a daughter for whom she harbors high hopes for a good American life. And all four women had, in their murky Chinese histories, mothers whose positions were inferior even to their daughters’, yet who fought tenaciously for their girl children.

At once you will perceive a rather too fearful symmetry in those fearsome foursomes. It takes four to play mahjong, which is how Miss Tan must have gotten the idea to do everything foursquarely by fours. Yet however this may work in the wider scope and statelier pace of the novel, a movie— even a two-and-a-half-hour one-cannot bear this much freight. The Joy Luck Club must juggle the stories of four grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and, to make it a baker’s dozen, a pair of sisters, whom their mother had to abandon in China, and whom, years later, their American half-sister, June, comes to fetch to America. To make this meeting more tearjerking, the elderly sisters expected to see their and June’s mother, but learn now that Mother died recently, and that half-sister June is all they get. Tears of joy proliferate nevertheless, and the movie ends awash in liquid sentiment.