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61 pages 2 hours read

The Joy Luck Club

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989

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Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Feathers from a Thousand Li Away” : “Feathers from a Thousand Li Away”

This first section begins with a story, in which a woman remembers how she bought an expensive swan that had originally been a duck that stretched its neck.

The woman carries the swan on a ship to America, where she believes that she can someday give it to her daughter. In America, authorities take the swan away, leaving only a feather. The woman does not tell her daughter about the feather because she is waiting until she can do so in perfect English.

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Jing-Mei Woo: The Joy Luck Club”

The story takes place in the late 1980s. Jing-Mei, nicknamed June, describes how her Chinese-born mother Suyuan died suddenly two months earlier. Now Jing-Mei is expected to take her mother’s place in the Joy Luck Club, a social club founded by her mother with three other immigrant women soon after arriving in San Francisco from China in 1949.

Suyuan told Jing-Mei many times about how she had originally founded the Joy Luck Club in China during the Japanese occupation of Kweilin. Suyuan devised a club to share food and play mahjong to help forget the terrible conditions of the occupation. Suyuan once told Jing-Mei that she lost her twin babies when she fled the city but she did not tell her the whole story.

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