CBBC Week Two: The Joy Luck Club, Part II

Past discussions:
Week One: Part I

Welcome to Week Two of Cool Bloggers Book Club (CBBC) for The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. This week we'll be discussing Part II, "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates." 

Suz was the firs to send in a photo. Confetti for Suz!

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What happened in these chapters?

This part begins with a parable about a mother not allowing her daughter to ride her bicycle out of sight. The mother says it is a warning in a book called The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, but the book is in Chinese, so the girl cannot read it. When the girl hurries to get away from her mother, she falls. 

Then we move on to follow Waverly Jong, who is Lindo's daughter. After Waverly's brother gets a chess set for Christmas, Waverly becomes a chess prodigy. Lindo brags about Waverly and takes credit for her success. This culminates in a scene in which Waverly yells at Lindo in the middle of the street and the family freeze Waverly out.

The next chapter is told from Lena St. Clair's perspective. Lena is the daughter of Ying-Ying (she who fell off a boat) and her English-Irish father. Ying-Ying never learns English very well and her husband talks for her a lot. When her father gets a promotion, the St. Clairs move to the North Beach neighborhood where Lena hears the girl next door, Teresa, fighting with her mother all the time. Ying-Ying delivers a baby who dies immediately and then Ying-Ying sinks into depression. Lena comforts herself that at least things are better for her than Teresa, but that is later proven false when she heard Teresa and her mother "laughing and crying, crying and laughing, shouting with love." ("The Voice from the Wall")

Allison has two copies.

Rose is An-Mei Hsu's daughter (she who sliced off part of her arm to feed to her own mother). Rose is getting a divorce from her husband and is nervous to tell An-Mei. Then Rose tells a story from her childhood in which the family went to the beach where she was supposed to watch her younger brother Bing, but Bing drowns. The family cannot find his body, so Rose and her mother go back to the beach the next day to no avail.

Lastly, we go back to Jing-Mei Woo (June), whose story of her mother's fleeing from China without her children was recounted in the first chapter. June and her mother want June to be a prodigy, but she's just not. Suyuan wanted June to learn to play piano and June went along with it, but she was not really trying because her piano teacher was deaf. At a performance before all of Suyuan's friends from the Joy Luck Club, June absolutely bombs. "Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. 'You aren't a genius like me,' she said matter-of-factly. ("Two Kinds") Suyuan and June have a fight when Suyuan wants June to continue piano lessons when June says "I wish I were dead! Like them," referring to her Suyuan's daughters in China. 

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Nance, Ernie, and Lisa all have the same copy. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

Winston and Vincent decided they were more interested in roaming the streets afterschool in their Hopalong Cassidy cowboy hats. ("Rules of the Game")

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Lines of note:

Inside, the butchers with their blood-stained white smocks deftly gutted the fish while customers cried out their orders and shouted, "Give me your freshest," to which the butchers always protested, "All are freshest." On less crowded market days, we would inspect the crates of live frogs and crabs which we were warned not to poke, boxes of dried cuttlefish, and row upon row of iced prawns, squid, and slippery fish. The sanddabs made me shiver each time; their eyes lay on one flattened side and reminded me of my mother's story of a careless girl who ran into a crowded street and was crushed by a cab. ("Rules of the Game")

Seriously, this book has such repulsive passages in it. 

Seventeen years ago she was chagrined when I started dating Ted...Ted and I met in a politics of ecology class when he leaned over and offered to pay me two dollars for the last week's notes. I refused the money and accepted a cup of coffee instead. This was during my second semester at UC Berkeley, where I had enrolled as a liberal arts major and later changed to fine arts. Ted was in his third year in pre-med, his choice, he told me, ever since he dissected a fetal pig in sixth grade. ("Half and Half")

I am married to a Ted (for seventeen years even) and we met in a political science program in grad school. If anything about this book is prophetic, I don't want anything to do with this divorce future. 

mbmom11 and her cat Espurr and Birchie and Doggo are reading along.

We used to discuss some of these matters, but we both knew the question would boil down to my saying, "Ted, you decide." After a while, there were no more discussions. Ted simply decided. ("Half and Half")

I feel this is my soul. Neither of is is really a good decision-maker (hence why we've been test driving cars for literal months and still haven't bought one - remember when Sarah and her husband bought a new car on the spur of the moment? - that does not go down in our house and if someone asks a question and the other person shrugs or says I don't know/care, it can set off a true marital conflict. (Wait...is this book prophetic? I want NOTHING to do with it.)

And although my father was a not a fisherman but a pharmacist's assistant who had once been a doctor in China, he believed in his nengkan, his ability to do anything he put his mind to. My mother believed she had nengkan to cook anything my father had a mind to catch. It was this belief in their nengkan that had brought my parents to America. It had enabled them to have seven children and buy a house in the Sunset district with very little money. It had given them the confidence to believe their luck would never run out, that God was on their side, that the house gods only had benevolent things to report...("Half and Half")

I am not even sure I'm capable of truly being responsible enough for the care of a dog and a cat and people think they can raise children and be successful in countries where the majority of people speak a different language than you. And, I mean, to be fair, many immigrants are successful people! I just can't imagine the confidence. 

Jacquie's reading in Japan and J's in California. 

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Things I looked up:

sanddab ("Rules of the Game") - fish also known as the soft flounder, mottle sanddab, or megrim, it has a sweet tasting meat, but savory skin

By Frank Schoonover - Delaware Art Museumfrom “The Fight at Buckskin,” by Clarence Edward Mulford, in Outing Magazine, December 1905, Delart, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6055688

Hopalong Cassidy ("Rules of the Game") - Originally a character developed in the early 1900s by author Clarence E. Mulford, who wrote Cassidy as a rude, dangerous man who had been shot in the leg during a gun fight, which is how he developed the Hopalong nickname. From the 1930s through the 1950s, actor William Boyd played Cassidy in a series of films and children-oriented radio and television programs. Boyd's portrayal of Cassidy was much more squeaky clean and had little relation to Mulford's original character.

By Employee(s) of Paramount Pictures - http://www.doctormacro.com/Movie%20Summaries/E/Eagle%27s%20Brood,%20The.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28279699

Devil's Slide ("Half and Half") - a coastal promontory in California, United States. It lies on the San Mateo County coast between Pacifica and Montara. Its name comes from the rocky edges prone to slope failure. I mostly looked this up because I wanted to see photos of the beach.

Devil's Slide (far left) with the southern portal of the Tom Lantos Tunnels (far right) under construction in late 2010. Note the steeply eroded cliffs immediately above and below Highway 1.

The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates (all of it) - this is a fictional book created by Amy Tan for The Joy Luck Club - I will admit that I was uncertain if it was fiction or not when I looked it up. 

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Questions to ponder:

1. There is a stereotype about Asian immigrant parents pushing their children. Waverly and June represent two ends of the spectrum - Waverly is a successful chess prodigy and June doesn't even really try with the piano. What do you think will be the result for each of them as they age? 

2. I have a question about what is going on with the names of Rose's brothers. They are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Bing. Now, I'm a heathen, but even I know the four Gospel writers are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (to be completely transparent, I had to ask my husband for the term Gospel). The assumption I made reading this book was that An-mei lost her faith the day Bing died, but the naming him Bing sort of presumes that it happened before this. Is Bing a nickname? What am I missing? 

3. The last line of "The Rules of the Game" is "I closed my eyes and pondered my next move." What do you think Waverly's next move will be?

4. Poor Ying-Ying. I don't know if I have a real question here, but if this were an IRL book club, I'd want to spend a lot of time talking about how hard her life is. She can't communicate well with her husband, she has this terrible stillbirth and no one to talk to about it or maybe it was just a different time when people didn't know much about postpartum depression. What a difficult life for this woman.

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Homework for you:

If you're comfortable, ask a first- or second-generation immigrant about their relationship with their parents. Was there cultural miscommunication? Were they close with their parents? 

If you don't know anyone who you would feel comfortable asking these types of questions, do you have book recommendations that explore this parental theme in immigrant families?

(If you didn't send a book photo in this week and you want to send one in for next week, please do so.)

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Upcoming CBBC schedule:

October 27: Part III - American Translation
November 3: Part IV - Queen Mother of the Western Skies

November 10: Wrap up!