Wayne Determining Film: The Joy Luck Club

The 1993 Wayne Wang film, The Joy Luck Club takes place in San Francisco, California. It is a fast paced film that switches back and forth from the past to present. The characters consist of June, the main character, and her childhood friends: Waverly, Leena, and Rose. Also, her mother Suyuan, and her mother’s friends/childhood friend’s mothers: Lindo, Ying Yang, and An Mei (who she refers to as her aunts). The four mothers are in a club called “Joy Luck Club” where they meet to play a Chinese game called mahjong, and talk about their family.
In the beginning, June finds out from her aunts that her mother’s baby twins that she abandoned in China due to the Japanese Invasion are alive. So, June decides to visit them, and gets a farewell party. The stories of each of June’s three friends and their mothers get revisited during the farewell party. In an example, it gets discovered that Waverly’s mother, Lindo, was forced into a marriage as a child with another child who had no feelings for her. Then, she gets abandoned by her mother and lives with her husband and mother-in-law that abuses her for not getting pregnant by her soon. Lindo eventually escapes this torture by ripping her clothes and messing up her hair to seem like the ancestors talked to her. She uses their ancestors as her weapon to

Finally, she gets let go and moves to Shanghai, and then to America where she had Waverly. Much like the rest of the mother-and-daughter relationships from this film, they had a troubling relationship as well. As a child, Waverly was a