The Joy Luck Club by SparkNotes

Author:SparkNotes [SparkNotes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Summary—Introduction

In the parable that precedes the third section, a mother visits her daughter’s new condominium. She expresses dismay at the mirror her daughter has placed at the foot of the bed: she believes superstitiously that this mirror will cause her daughter’s marriage happiness to bounce back and deflect away. Her daughter dismisses the warning as just another example of her mother’s tendency to see everything as inauspicious. The mother then pulls out a second mirror, which she had bought as a housewarming gift, and places it at the head of the bed: the mirrors reflecting each other will multiply the daughter’s “peach-blossom luck,” she says. When the daughter asks her mother to explain this luck, the mother points into the mirror, and says that she can see her future grandchild. The daughter looks and sees the child in her own reflection.

Summary—Lena St. Clair: “Rice Husband”

Lena St. Clair, who discussed her childhood in “The Voice from the Wall,” begins by explaining how her mother has always been able to predict the evils that will affect their family. Now, says Lena, Ying-ying regrets never having done anything to prevent them. Lena wonders what her mother’s insights will reveal when she visits Lena and her husband, Harold, in their new home.

Lena thinks back to another instance of her mother’s predictive powers. Her mother had told her once that her future husband would have one pock mark on his face for every grain of rice Lena did not finish at dinner, and Lena had thought of a neighbor boy named Arnold, who had a pitted face. The boy had always treated Lena like a bully, and thus, to avoid having to marry him, the young Lena scraped every last grain of rice from her bowl: now she would marry only a smooth-faced man. Yet Ying-ying reminded Lena that for many years she had habitually left grains standing in her bowl. Terrified that she was fated to marry Arnold, Lena began to loathe her neighbor and wish for his death.

In Lena’s mind, the connection between her eating and its effect on whether or not she would marry Arnold soon progressed to a causal connection between her eating and the well-being of Arnold himself. The rice conceptually evoked his rice-grain-sized pock marks, and she believed that by leaving her rice, she would cause him to develop more marks. She refused to finish large portions of every kind of food, believing that they would somehow transfer into maladies on Arnold’s body. Five years later, although she had long forgotten Arnold, she had become addicted to not eating and was suffering from anorexia. When she learned that the seventeen-year-old Arnold had suddenly died of an extremely rare measles-related illness, she gorged herself on ice cream and spent the night throwing it up. Looking back, Lena knows that she cannot logically blame herself for Arnold’s death, and yet she wonders whether she might have willed it, whether Arnold was in fact “destined” to be her husband. Even when she

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