The Joy Luck Club – The Crack in the Dam of Asian American Representation Three Decades Later

By Daniel Jung

"Y

ou are an American. From this day on, no more Korean in this house, just English. You need to learn English to be successful in this country, so… no more Korean.”

This probably wasn’t verbatim, but this is how I remember my father’s pep talk before my first day of kindergarten in the early 1980s. I’m guessing most White fathers didn’t give their kids a life-shaping lesson on racial identity before their first day of school, but mine did. 

While I understand that racial assimilation wasn’t the end goal–instead my father was trying to instill a sense of belonging as a means towards future financial success–the result of this pep talk was my first indoctrination into white normativity, even white supremacy. Asianness was something to be kept hidden because it was detrimental to Americanness. Cue shame. 

This mindset would play out over the course of my entire childhood.

I dreaded picture day. One day a year we would line up outside the school cafeteria and wait for the photographer’s assistant to call us in to have our picture taken. Our photographer was a boisterously cheery (what my teenage daughter would now call “cringey”) middle-aged man who would give us pop-culture nicknames as we sat down to have our picture taken. My White friends got called in and the photographer would always have the coolest nicknames for them.

“Whoa! Here comes the Top Gun! Maverick, you can always be my wingman.”
“Is that Bruce Springsteen? Can I get your autograph?”

Without fail, when it was my turn, the photographer would make prayer-hands, bow his head, and mockingly say, “Ahhh….Mistah Miyagi. Wax on wax off, Daniel-san.”

I would smile, sit down, get blinded by the flash and move on with the rest of my day.
I wanted to be the Boss. Why couldn’t I be Maverick? Hell, I would have settled for Goose. 

Bruce Lee.

Connie Chung. 

Mr. Miyagi (a fictional character; not even Pat Morita).

That was most Asian American representation in public consciousness during my childhood in the late 80s and early 90s. To a lesser extent, there was also George Takei and Ke Huy Quan, the little Asian kid in The Goonies and Indiana Jones; The Temple of Doom.  There was so little Asian representation that Snow White was our favorite Disney character because of her jet-black hair and rounder face. She was the closest thing we had to a Disney Princess, so we adopted her as our own. And so, every year, I would hope the cringey photographer would refer to me as Indiana Jones instead of Short Round and every year, I left the cafeteria with nothing but temporary flash blindness and disappointment. 

Change came slowly until September of 1993. A major Hollywood movie about four Chinese immigrant families opened in theaters across the country. The Joy Luck Club, a film adaptation of the 1989 novel written by Amy Tan, was met with soaring reviews. Siskel and Ebert gave the movie their illustrious “two thumbs up.” Although the movie was about Chinese Americans living in San Francisco, and I was a Korean American teenager living 50 miles south in Santa Clara, it was close enough. 

My parents and I watched the movie a few months later, (we rented it at Blockbuster Video) and for the first time, I saw people who looked like me, speaking without an Asian accent, and even more jarring, not portrayed as a Kungfu fighter, seductive temptress, or emasculated comic relief. They went to school, had piano recitals, and competed in chess tournaments. But they did so with a distinct Asian Americanness.

In one of the more memorable scenes of the movie, a young chess prodigy named Waverly (played by Vu Mai and later by Tamilyn Tomita) was sick of being paraded around town by her mother (Tsai Chin). Showing off a copy of Time Magazine with Waverly on the cover, Mother Lindo proudly boasted about her daughter’s chess prowess. Waverly did not take kindly to her objectification and tried best to express her frustration yet remain respectful to her mother. (In Asian cultures, parental deference is equivalent to obeying the Fifth Commandment.)

“I wish you wouldn’t do that…telling everyone I’m your daughter.”
“What you mean? You so ashamed to be with your mother?”
“It’s not that. It’s just that it’s so… embarrassing.”

“What?!? Embarrassed to be my daughter?”

Waverly pauses and her demeanor changes, signifying a discarding of her ingrained Asian deference to elders.

“Why do you have to use me to show off?!? If you want to show off… then why don’t YOU learn how to play chess?”

There was so much miscommunication in this scene, and it was fueled not only by the language barrier, but more so by the cultural divide between the generations. On one hand, there’s Waverly’s “American” ideal of individualism, and on the other hand is Mother Lindo’s pride that her daughter’s achievement brings recognition to the community and her family. Seeing this tension play out onscreen was frustrating and liberating. 

As Asian American Christians, scenes like this help us understand the importance of representation, not only as a secular virtue, but a theological one as well. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ as a human is made more clearer, more robust, more personal when we see representations of this miracle in the everyday articulations of Asian American life. These representations help us embody what it means to be Asian American, and therefore, embrace the imago Dei. We can recognize that the tension between cultures is our God-given collective story and it’s one that is still being written today. 

After watching Joy Luck Club with my parents, and while the video tape was rewinding, I asked my father, “Dad, did we also have a backstory like that?”
“No! Don’t be ridiculous. We are a normal family.”

It wasn’t until much later in adulthood, after I had kids of my own, that my father told me all our family stories from the Motherland and to my surprise, our stories were the same! Drunkenness, prostitution, betrayal, as well as love, courage, and tremendous sacrifice. It was all there. Much like an entire generation of Asian Americans, I am finding out that the decades-long developing arc of our own story–as we’ve come to grips with what it means to be a “normal” American family–mirrors the growing legacy of The Joy Luck Club. With JLC, the dam for Asian American stories should have broken wide open, but it didn’t happen overnight. Only now are we seeing the floodgates begin to open with recent movies like Crazy Rich Asians, Minari, Shang Chi and Always Be My Maybe. From comedy to family drama, from superheroes to central figures of rom-coms, modern Asian American representation has broken free from the reigns of the stereotypical Hollywood movie tropes… and we are here for it. The movie is now being recognized as the monumental crack in the dam. In 2020, the National Film Registry selected JLC for preservation into their archives for “cultural, historic, or aesthetic importance.”

Three decades later, the legacy of The Joy Luck Club continues to grow and run parallel to the growth of Asian American representation in pop culture, as what it means to be a “normal” American continues to be redefined. Though recent movies now run the gamut of Asian American stories, they all owe their deferential respect to The Joy Luck Club.

Photo Courtesy Buena Vista Pictures

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Daniel Jung is a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary and lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, with his wife, Debbie, their two children, and their long-haired chihuahua. Together, they serve at HCPC Living Stones EM, a Korean American multigenerational ministry located in the Upper Manoa Valley.