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Amy TanA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
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.
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.
By Amy Tan
A Pair of Tickets
A Pair of Tickets
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Fish Cheeks
Fish Cheeks
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Mother Tongue
Mother Tongue
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Rules of the Game
Rules of the Game
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Saving Fish from Drowning
Saving Fish from Drowning
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The Bonesetter's Daughter
The Bonesetter's Daughter
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The Hundred Secret Senses
The Hundred Secret Senses
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The Kitchen God's Wife
The Kitchen God's Wife
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The Valley of Amazement
The Valley of Amazement
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Two Kinds
Two Kinds
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