Their daughters hardly seem to know about their mothers' histories. Ying-ying comes from a privileged family but is doomed to marry badly.

At an early age, Lindo is sold off by her impoverished family to be the wife of a rich local family's favourite son. They are openly contemptuous of her absent mother, who, we discover, is one of several concubines of a wealthy man who lives in a different part of China. Until the age of nine, An‑mei is brought up by her grandmother and aunt. Looking back on their childhoods in China, each of the mothers has a story of suffering. As narrators, they speak to the reader rather than to each other. It is no narrative trick, for we realise as we read on that mothers and daughters hardly know anything about each others' lives. Otherwise, the storytellers of the different generations are segregated from each other by the novel's structure. Her mother's harrowing story – fleeing the advancing Japanese during the second world war, she left behind her twin babies and never knew their fate – is told through June's recollections. June's presence at the table with the older women allows for some exchange between the generations. Men feature as the silently soup-eating fathers watching the game, or the feckless, manipulative non-Chinese husbands who turn up in the daughters' narratives. The first and last parts of the novel consist of the stories of the four mothers the second and third parts give us the stories of their four daughters. It requires four players to play four hands each comparably, the novel is divided into four main parts, each of which is subdivided into four separate stories, each told by a different narrator.

The structure of the novel imitates the game, which is similar to the card game rummy, though played with 136 variously marked Chinese tiles. When the novel begins, June's mother has recently died, and she is about to take up 'the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club' in her place. In the first part of The Joy Luck Club, we find out from our first narrator, Jing-mei Woo ('June'), that her mother and three other elderly ladies, all first-generation Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, have for many years been meeting regularly to eat together and play mah-jong.

T hough it is not essential to the enjoyment of Amy Tan's geometrically structured novel, some understanding of the rules of mah-jong might help the reader appreciate its shapeliness.

The joy luck club book pages