The Message of ‘Joy Luck’

Sharon Yamato Danley should start a new club, “The Kill Joy Luck Club”: I was fascinated to read her commentary on the movie but taken aback by the spirit that suffuses the article (“Joy Luck Mothers Not Honest, Real,” Oct. 11). I had a different take on the movie, and I am an Asian-American woman too.

I saw the point of the movie, its message, in its opening. The movie is about “hope, not joy nor luck, but the joy in the hope of getting lucky.” Hope is the key word and the main point of the movie. “The Joy Luck Club” is a fairy-tale depiction of mothers and daughters’ triumphant interpersonal relationships in spite of all the wrongs done unto them and unto themselves.

Unreal? Yes! But it’s entertainment in fictive form, not a documentary. Its aim is to infuse joy in the hope that we (daughters/ mothers) might be as lucky as they (the movie characters), if we are strong and wise, etc.

Yes, Danley is right. The movie was “hypnotic and mythological,” but that is a plus, a device that allows us to bear witness to the sacrifice the mothers made for their daughters.

But no! Myths are not liabilities but the stuff movies are made of. Like novels they can and do legitimately give us hope and spirit, our balancing poles, helping us walk the tightrope we call life.

ANH NGUYEN

Venice