Mei Hsu And Suyuan Woo In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan is an American writer who has written several bestselling novels, non-fiction essays, and children’s books. Amy was the second-born out of three children to Chinese immigrants, Daisy and John, who was an electrical engineer and a Baptist minister. She was born in Oakland, California. John, Amy’s father and Peter, Amy’s older brother both died of brain tumors within a month of each other which made her mother decide to move her and her younger brother to New York, Washington, Florida, Germany, Netherlands, and finally to Switzerland, where they eventually settled down and where she graduated high school. After so, they moved back to the United States and they settled in San Francisco. Amy Tan had her fair share of painful life experiences,

It consisted of sixteen related stories about the experiences of four Chinese-American mother-daughter pairs. According to Dong in Reading Amy Tan, “Daisy’s tragic experiences directly inspired the stories of the characters An-mei Hsu and Suyuan Woo in The Joy Luck Club” (Dong 3). The character Suyuan Woo in The Joy Luck Club was a woman who was born into a wealthy family, married an officer in the army, and gives birth to twin girls; she later lost this family during the Sino-Japanese war. Suyuan narrated, “The man who was my husband brought me and our two babies to Kweilin because he thought we would be safe. He was an officer with the Kuomintang” (Tan 21). Daisy was an inspiration to this character as she was also born into a wealthy family, married an air force pilot, and have had daughters from her previous marriage. Furthermore, the character of An-mei also has a similarity to Daisy’s life. An-mei’s character had a flashback into her childhood, “when I was a young girl in China, my grandmother told me my mother was a ghost. This did not mean my mother was dead. In those days, a ghost was anything we were forbidden to talk about” (Tan 42). An-mei was a member of the Joy Luck club with a mother who was widowed and disowned by her family when she remarried as a man’s fourth wife. Similarly, Daisy influenced this character as her mother was a young widow, who was raped by a very rich and powerful man and later became the very wealthy and powerful man’s mistress. In Amy’s other written works, some of the characters were also based on her mother’s life. However, this was not the only way Daisy influenced Amy’s