Movie Review: Joy Luck Club

Spoilers, obviously.

I rarely watch movies except when I travel, but I travel a lot so it turns out I actually watch a lot of movies. Most of the time I turn to action adventure or comedy, movies where I can meaningfully turn my brain off and just enjoy spectacle. I know that the plane TV screen is rarely the right form factor, but if I'm watching a movie like Avengers 17 it probably doesn't matter that much anyway.

The only reason I ended up watching Joy Luck Club is because my wife who was sitting next to me wanted to, and we generally try to watch the same movie when we're together so we can talk about it afterwards.

I'm glad I did, this was a great movie that is shockingly relevant and has aged very well.

A brief summary of the movie.

Joy Luck Club is a 1993 movie based on a 1989 book of the same name. The movie centers on the lives and stories of 4 mother/daughter pairs. The mothers are all Chinese immigrants, first generations who fled harsh conditions in order to make a better life in America. The daughters are all, of course, second generation, grappling with the inherent culture clash of being their mother's daughters.

Each mother is given an extended flashback to their time in China and the conditions that led to their departure. The movie doesn't hide from sensitive or difficult topics — war, child marriage, domestic abuse, family abuse, rape, abandonment, parental neglect, and death are all mixed in with a general cultural attitude that is, let's say, not particularly kind to women. Each daughter is ALSO given a flashback, and though these tend to be a bit more light than checks notes dissociating and drowning your firstborn son, they hit on complicated themes familiar to every immigrant kid: how to have a relationship with a mother you don't understand, how to live in a society that sees you as an outsider, how to relate to and understand yourself in the larger context of your upbringing. That last piece ends up being a core thread of each story. Though each daughter has something of a rocky relationship with her mother, each one also ends up learning a lot about herself through her mom's eyes.

Funny enough, there are a lot of things I didn't like about this movie.

Joy Luck Club is, at its core, a set of character studies; there's only the barest hint of a plot, and most of its two hour nineteen minute runtime is used to explore the nuances and motivations of the 8 main characters. That may seem like a long time — and for movies at the time, it was really long — but it's actually painfully short for this movie in particular. I don't mind a character study, the Before trilogy are some of my favorite movies. But eight character studies at once is just a lot. In order to speed things along, the movie relies heavily on voice-over narrative, vignettes and montages, and telling instead of showing. The overall result is a very talky movie, one that doesn't really utilize many of the benefits of working in video as a medium and could just as easily be a book.¹

This is exacerbated by a cast that is just ok at acting. Many of the older cast members did a great job; many of the younger cast members were a bit uninspiring. Not terrible if there's a lot of other things going on, but there isn't anything else going on, so it's quite noticeable. Add on top a musical score that is, in my opinion, just a bit too sappy, and a distinct lack of interesting or exciting camerawork and cinematography, and the overall effect is a vague sort of canned.

But even with all that, I rank this one as one of the better films I've seen recently. At the end of the day, this movie was never going to be about the lighting and camera work, that's not what makes it resonate. The important part of this movie is the writing itself, and how well it captures the immigrant experience. And there, it truly excels.

A — possibly THE — fundamental theme of every immigrant's life story is hope for their children. Every generation is struggling and striving to provide a better life for their kids. And sometimes that means difficult choices, choices that are impossible to explain. Through the lens of the mothers we get glimpses of the sacrifices of their mothers before them. From the viewer's perspective it all makes sense. But from the child's perspective…How could Lindo understand that when her impoverished mother left her to be betrothed as a child, it was in the hope that she would thrive in a wealthy family? How could An-Mei understand that her mother committed suicide to protect her daughter? The frame story of the movie is about Suyuan having to abandon her twin girls in the hopes that someone else would find and raise them — and yet those twins spend their whole life believing that they were left behind and unloved.

And this directly points to a fundamental theme of every immigrant child's life: understanding the contradiction inherent to being an immigrant kid! A second-gen child is living out their parent's dream without realizing it. They are sheltered from the struggles of the motherland, but that same shelter makes them unable to see the forces driving their parents. They have no understanding of the traditions their parents left behind, even as they feel its acute absence in a country that will never quite know what to do with them, and even as their parents mourn the death of their culture in the next generation. These tensions drive the daughters in Joy Luck Club. June doesn't understand why her mother always seems so disappointed in her accomplishments, especially compared to the other kids. Rose subsumes her own personality in order to fit in with her rich white in-laws and their associates. Waverly feels like she can never live up to her mother's expectations and just can't figure out why. And so on.

Each daughter carries the hopes and dreams and sacrifices of her parents on her shoulders. That weight is crushing. But though the pathologies of each generation end up impacting the one below, each mother is also able to pass on critical wisdom to her daughter — lessons that help the next generation avoid the mistakes of their parents. And at the end of the day, each daughter is able to fulfill her parents' greatest wish: to live a better life.

In 1990-something the broader themes of Joy Luck Club are, if anything, somewhat mundane. In the early-to-mid 90s, the neoliberal project was in full swing. People on both the left and right throw around that word — neoliberal — like it's a slur these days; it's easy to forget that that particular brand of policy and politics brought hundreds of millions out of poverty while ushering in the digital age. It was also uniquely friendly to immigrants and immigration. The H1-B visa was created in 1990. So were new visa categories for family-based immigration. There was an increase in refugee admissions, an extension of cold war humanitarian policies. The overall immigration ceiling was raised nearly 40%. And, look, it's possible I am just being naive. I was born in '96, so I didn't live through most of this directly. Still, I get the sense that when Joy Luck Club came out, the country as a whole was excited to be a place where the best and brightest could come to find their version of the American Dream. That was the story I grew up with, the national mythos that I was taught from age 3 onwards. In that context, Joy Luck Club is a beautiful movie but it's not pushing any boundaries.

But it's not 1990-something. It's 2025. And in 2025, Joy Luck Club feels revolutionary.

I might be uniquely sensitive to the current moment. My Dad came to the US on an H1B originally; my whole life here in the US is on the back of his ability to immigrate through that visa. And, uh, I don't know if you've been online recently, but there's been a lot of chatter about the H1B program generally and Indian immigrants specifically.

Fuck you.

There's a lot to say about the whole immigration debate, and about Trump 2.0, and *gestures* all of that. Another post for another time. For now, I'll leave off by saying that the reason something like Joy Luck Club feels so radical is because it enters a profoundly political debate without any political ambitions, like walking into gunfire with a flower in hand.

Yes, this is a movie about immigrants, but they aren’t symbols or caricatures that serve some broader political argument. They’re just people. They’re treated like people. And in doing so, the movie forces us to acknowledge that immigrants are in fact people, with real potential and real dreams and real sacrifices, who have a lot that they can bring to their new home. The movie humanizes its cast, allowing us to empathize with their struggles and see the world from their eyes. I think that it is very very hard to really understand the stories of these women, to internalize their struggles for 2 hours and 19 minutes, and still come out and say that immigrants are worthless and shouldn't be allowed in the country. Sometimes that emotional lens is more powerful than all the statistics and data points and think tanks and policy wonks in the world.

1. Yes, I know that it's already a book, that's the joke.