A New Way to Read the Joy Luck Club and Other Immigrant Literature Through the Window of Play
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Betting Across Borders: A New Way to Read The Joy Luck Club and Other Immigrant Literature through the Window of Play En Li Assistant Professor of History Drake University RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 17 Betting Across Borders: A New Way to Read The Joy Luck Club and Other Immigrant Literature through the Window of Play1 Abstract This article examines how literature involving games represents immigrants by focusing on the representation of the game mahjong in Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Providing a new way to read The Joy Luck Club through the window of play, this article also analyzes more broadly how games intersect with immigrant experience in other immigrant literature. Building on but further articulating the intersection between games and immigrants, this article uses three thematic approaches to demonstrate how games contribute to the public narrative of immigration in literature. First, games as an activity to describe immigrant experiences and convey characters. Second, games as a metaphor and a plot-driven device to reflect on immigrant experience. And third, games as an intellectual trend to create dialogue with mainstream culture to negotiate the public narrative of Asian American cultural identities. Key words: immigrant, literature, games, mahjong, culture 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Faculty Writing Group’s summer workshop at Drake University in May 2018, and a Mellon Seminar “Theorizing the Displaced in Asia,” organized by Dr. Lori Watt, at Washington University in St. Louis in June 2018. I wish to thank all the participants in these two workshops for their thoughtful comments, advice, and assistance. The structure and argument of the final draft have benefited from the constructive remarks sent by two anonymous reviewers. Any errors that remain are my own. RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 18 And I am sitting at my mother’s place at the mahjong table, on the East, where things begin.2 – Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 1989. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.3 – Min Jin Lee, Pachinko, 2017. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such limited imaginings.4—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2006. How does literature involving games represent immigrants? In overseas Chinese communities, many men and women engaged in gambling games since the nineteenth century. Gambling was even once considered to be one of the reasons for racial discrimination against Chinese immigrants. While Chinese immigrants appeared in social history as either a hard- working minority or as participants in gambling-related crimes, the narrative surrounding games in Chinese American literature tells a different story. This article examines this issue through the game mahjong in Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Providing a new way to read The Joy Luck Club through the window of play, this article also analyzes more broadly how games intersect with immigrant experience in other immigrant literature. In The Joy Luck Club, a novel usually depicted as a story of mothers and daughters and assimilation, the mahjong game serves as a form of community building for the first-generation Chinese immigrant cohorts to the U.S. It produced affective hopefulness and bonds of ethnic and social class cohesion across historical moments. Mahjong played a crucial role in building and maintaining the social fabric in the immigrant community, represented in the friendship among the four Chinese mothers living in the U.S. To the second-generation Chinese Americans in the novel, mahjong could recall memories of childhood and family life, even in the sounds and smells of the game. In general, mahjong gives glimpse of how immigrants and their descendants navigate transpacific identities and intergenerational relationships in The Joy Luck Club. 2 Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), 39. 3 Min Jin Lee, Pachinko (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017), 412. 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), 7. RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 19 Building on but further articulating the intersection between games and immigrants, this article uses three thematic approaches to demonstrate how games contribute to the public narrative of immigration in literature. First, games as an activity to describe immigrant experiences and convey characters. Second, games as a metaphor and a plot-driven device to reflect on immigrant experience. And third, games as an intellectual trend to create dialogue with mainstream culture to negotiate the public narrative of Asian American cultural identities. By focusing on The Joy Luck Club and touching on other immigrant writings and documentary films, as well as secondary theoretical materials, this article shows mahjong as a key activity of cultural transition between China and the U.S. for immigrants of this era. More importantly, when games travel across cultures, games function as a space of cultural negotiation that creates a social space for both the preservation of Chinese cultural traditions and ties and a way of navigating immigration to a new country and language. Surely, mahjong in China is different from mahjong played by Chinese immigrants in some ways. The core of this article is navigating cultural meaning. Tan uses the game metaphorically to represent Chinese immigration to the U.S. The success of her novel, along with all other evidence this article deploys, suggests that the games function allegorically for immigrants grappling with displacement in a foreign and often unwelcoming country. In her recent book about the settlement of Chinese migrants in Hong Kong during the Cold War, Laura Madokoro, a historian, questions how society could help make the transition from refugees to migrants beyond the existing labels and categories.5 From a humanitarian perspective, games can be useful tools to create dialogue with and from socially constructed labels, categories, and identities. Drawing from literary sources and memoirs, the author is aware of the challenges and limits of scholarly examination of literature as historical fact, particularly in the case of memory, since the memory is not the memory of players, but, in most cases, of the next generation. To some extent, the authors likely romanticize, fictionalize, and sanitize their memories to fit their imagined audience in the West. As children, these authors, along with the interviewees in the documentary, were probably shielded from any of the possible negative sides of gambling as play, for example, losing money. Admittedly, there are other types of evidence that can inspire further research, for example, unpublished memoirs. Some Chinese American museums and archives in coastal areas in the U.S. might have more materials to draw conclusions from as socio-historical evidences. In the end, Asian American literature should be considered an important part of American studies that has influenced American culture. Through literary representation, the notion of gaming was modified and presented in a “safe” form for the cultural mainstream. 6 As a deliberate choice, representing games provides a different aspect from which to understand social history.7 In social records, people only saw what players did and judged 5 Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 11, 220. 6 Tara Fickle, “American Rules and Chinese Faces: The Games of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.) 3 (2014): 85; Michael Oriard, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 379. 7 Douglas Anthony Guerra, “On the Move: Games and Gaming Figures in Nineteenth- Century U.S. Literature,” Dissertation (2012), 10, 14. RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 20 their behavior as either virtuous or licentious. Literary texts, The Joy Luck Club in this article for example, realistic or not, in line with other accounts, serve as evidence and offer a more individual perspective to help to glimpse into a side of the story that social history does not convey. Mahjong: Chinese Origin and Overseas Variations Mahjong is a game involving multiple players, requiring skill, and is also partly a game of chance. The game is played with 140 tiles (or cards). The tiles are composed of three money suits: (cash [tongzi 筒子], string [suozi 索子], and myriad [wanzi 萬子]); four winds: (east [dong 東], south [nan 南], west [xi 西], and north [bei 北]); four seasons: (spring [chun 春], summer [xia 夏], autumn [qiu 秋], and winter [dong 冬]); as well as the special tiles such as center [zhong 中], wealth [fa 發], and empty planks [bai 白]. Mahjong requires four players to sit at four sides of the table. It is a game of taking turns to draw and discard tiles. The aim of the game is to create winning sets by discarding and picking appropriate tiles. Dice also are employed, but their use is limited to determine where the tiles are first drawn.8 In order to increase the chance of winning, players have to watch and memorize what tiles have been discarded. They also need to be careful of not discarding tiles that other players need to make winning sets. Therefore, mahjong involves a mastery of some skill instead of sheer chance, which gives players a sense of achievement and satisfaction compared to other gambling forms that depend only on luck. Mahjong was a long-lasting practice in China and has been a symbol of an affluent, slow- paced, and traditional lifestyle.