The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club Kwelin - How It All Began to Present Day

The Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Claires are the other families in the Joy Luck Club. They all met at the First Chinese Baptist Church. The narrator of this story is Jing-mei, she is part of the Woo family. Note that this short story within the book also serves as the title for the book as a whole.

REVIEW FROM YESTERDAY-

REVIEW FROM YESTERDAY CONTINUED -

The first Joy Luck Club was started in Kwelin, China by Suyuan Woo The second one was also started by Suyuan Woo, but this one was located in San Fransisco Suyuan asked the Hsus, Jongs, and St. Claires to join because Suyuan sensed that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies that they left behind in China and hopes that couldn't begin to express in their fragile English Suyuan would tell her daughter about the original Joy Luck Club when she was bored Each year, this story got a little darker

FLASHBACK

A flashback  is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory.

Vivid language used by Suyuann to describe Kwelin-

The peaks looked like giant fried fish heads trying to jump out of a vat of oil.

The hills would suddenly become monstrous elephants marching slowly toward me!

Magic moss lined the banks.

Suyuann goes to Kweilin for safety

 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.

The Kuomintang was a political party founded by Sun Yat Sen - they lost to the communist party.

Suyuann describes the despair she felt during the war -

Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?

How much can you wish for a favorite warm coat that hangs in the closet of a house that burned down with your mother and father inside of it?

How long can you see in your mind arms and legs hanging from telephone wires and starving dogs running down the streets with half-chewed hands dangling from their jaws?

Suyuann Woo

The thought of The Joy Luck Club gave her hope

Suyuan does not live in the past. She lives in the present and hopes for a better future -

"But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable."

""Why do you think you are missing something you never had?"

Multiple Choice

A flashback is

• the different drives of the characters or forces involved.

• a universal idea, lesson, or message explored throughout a work of literature

• an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story.

Multiple Choice

The peaks looked like giant fried fish heads trying to jump out of a vat of oil.

The sentence above contains what device?

• metaphor

• simile

• flashback

• idiom

Multiple Select

Check all that apply

Suyuan started the Kwelin Joy Luck Club because

• to escape the horrors of the war going on around her

• to escape her first husband

• to bring a bit of joy and a bit of hope into her life as well as the lives of the three other ladies she asked to join

• to prevent herself from dwelling on the losses in her life