By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Feathers from a Thousand Li Away’ is a short one-page parable which acts as preface to Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. The novel as a whole is a series of interlinked stories about the daughters of Chinese immigrants who came to America, hoping to give their daughters a better life.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Fish Cheeks’ is a short autobiographical narrative by the American writer Amy Tan (born 1952). Tan is probably best-known for The Joy Luck Club, her 1989 novel containing a series of interwoven short stories told by a number of Chinese-American women who are members of the titular club; but ‘Fish Cheeks’ was published two years before that novel appeared: it was first published in Seventeen magazine in 1987.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Mother Tongue’ is an essay by Amy Tan, an American author who was born to Chinese immigrants in 1952. Tan wrote ‘Mother Tongue’ in 1990, a year after her novel The Joy Luck Club was a runaway success. In the essay, Tan discusses her relationship with language, and how her mother’s influence has shaped her use of English, as well as her attitude to it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Voice from the Wall’ is a story from Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. The story is narrated by Lena St. Clair, the daughter of a Chinese mother and an Anglo-Irish father living in California.
Before we offer an analysis of Tan’s story, and explain why the story has the title ‘The Voice from the Wall’, it might be worth recapping the story’s plot.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Half and Half’ is one of the stories from Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Told by a Chinese American woman named Rose Hsu Jordan, ‘Half and Half’ incorporates two stories from the narrator’s life: the breakdown of her marriage to an American man named Ted, and an incident from her childhood when one of her younger brothers drowned while she was supposed to be looking after him.