At 25, 'The Joy Luck Club' is still a captivating Hollywood movie about Asian American identity and, finally, it's no longer the only one
"The Joy Luck Club" is a quadruple-decker melodrama, an incomparable tear-jerker and one of the most resonant immigrant sagas in contemporary American cinema. Shuttling between decades and continents, Wayne Wang's beloved and acclaimed 1993 adaptation of Amy Tan's equally beloved best-seller tells the stories of four women born in China before World War II, the four daughters they raise in San Francisco, and the legacies of suffering, shame and perseverance that bind them all.
On my first viewing 25 years ago, however, "The Joy Luck Club" struck me as nothing short of an emotional horror movie, a picture I often found myself watching - and rewatching - through my fingers. Admittedly, I was a squeamish 10-year-old at the time, too young not to recoil from, say, the discreetly framed image of a woman slicing into her own flesh, spilling her blood to prepare a soup for her ailing mother.
The significance of this woman's act of devotion, rooted in ancient tradition, wasn't lost on this California
