Amy Tan · 1989 · exile

Amy Tan's 1989 novel of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters. The mothers' stories reach back to a China they fled - Kweilin during the Japanese invasion, Shanghai, a forced marriage in Shanxi - carried across the Pacific to San Francisco, where the daughters grow up caught between worlds, until one returns to China to meet the half-sisters her mother lost.

1. 1
   Kweilin

   Wartime Guilin, where Suyuan holds the first Joy Luck Club amid the Japanese invasion and, fleeing on foot toward Chongqing, is forced to abandon her twin baby daughters on the road.

2. 2
   Shanghai

   The city the mothers pass through and leave behind, boarding ship for America and carrying their unspoken histories across the ocean to a new life.

3. 3
   San Francisco

   Chinatown and the new Joy Luck Club, where the mothers raise American daughters who cannot read them - until June sails back to China to meet the sisters her mother never found.