The Joy Luck Club family tree

The Joy Luck Club is a mahjong club of four women in San Francisco, and the novel gives each of them a daughter born in America. The Joy Luck Club family tree therefore has four families side by side rather than one family down the page.¹

The first and the last sections belong to the mothers, who tell of their lives in China. The two middle sections belong to the daughters, first as children and then as grown women. Jing-mei speaks for her dead mother in the first and last sections, so she has four stories and each of the other women has two.^3,1

Jing-mei opens the first section and closes the other three. An-mei, Lindo and Ying-ying tell the rest of the first section and return in the last, in that order and then with Ying-ying before Lindo. Waverly, Lena and Rose share the two middle sections, and Lena and Waverly change places between them.¹

Suyuan Woo founded the club and has died of a brain aneurysm before the novel opens, so her daughter Jing-mei takes her place at the table.^1,2 Jing-mei’s father is Canning Woo, Suyuan’s second husband.²

During the war Suyuan’s first husband, an officer of the Kuomintang, died, and while fleeing she left her twin baby daughters behind. Wikipedia names them Wang Chwun Yu and Wang Chwun Hwa.¹ GradeSaver adds that a peasant woman, Mei Ching, raised them.² On the Joy Luck Club family tree Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa stand under Suyuan and her first husband as twins, half sisters of Jing-mei.

In the second section Jing-mei tells how her mother pushed her to become a piano prodigy, and how she hurt Suyuan by wishing herself dead like the babies left in China. In the third section Suyuan gives her a jade pendant and says she is proud of her.³ The orange zigzag between them on the chart turns into a plain line at that point.

The Hsu branch of the Joy Luck Club family tree reaches back a generation further than the others. An-mei’s mother was widowed and became a concubine of the rich merchant Wu Tsing, and she later took her own life.^1,2 An-mei tells of the household and her mother’s death in the last section, and the chart marks the death there.³

An-mei married and had seven children. The Joy Luck Club family tree draws the two the novel follows, Rose and Bing.¹ Bing drowned at the age of four while Rose was watching him, and An-mei never gave up hope of his return.^2,3 Rose tells this in the second section.

Rose married Ted Jordan, a doctor. In the third section she receives divorce papers from him, and in the last section An-mei urges her to stand up to Ted as An-mei once stood up to the household of Wu Tsing.^3,2

Lindo was married as a girl to Tyan-yu, the spoiled son of a controlling mother, and she escaped the marriage by a trick of superstition. She tells this in the first section.^3,2 In America she married Tin Jong, and they had Winston, Vincent and Waverly.²

Waverly becomes a chess champion as a child and, in the second section, tells her mother to stop showing her off.³ As an adult she has a daughter, Shoshana, from her first marriage to Marvin Chen, and she is engaged to Rich. In the third section Lindo accepts Rich despite a poor first meeting.^2,3 Sources spell his surname Schields and Shields, and the chart keeps both as aliases.^1,2

In the last section mother and daughter sit together in a hair salon, and Waverly admits she is ashamed of her mother before both see how alike they are.³

Ying-ying’s first husband, Lin Xiao, treated her cruelly and later died. She then married Clifford St. Clair, an American who gave her the name Betty.¹ Their daughter Lena completes the fourth pair on the Joy Luck Club family tree. Wikipedia records a son who died at birth, and GradeSaver describes the grief that followed a lost baby.^1,3

Lena married Harold Livotny, her boss. In the third section she fears her mother will see that the marriage is failing, and Ying-ying does. In the last section Ying-ying tells her own story so that Lena will stand up to Harold.^3,1 GradeSaver lists Clifford as dead before the events of the novel, and the chart leaves him unmarked because the other source does not say so.²

A square is a man and a circle is a woman. A line between a couple with a line down to the children is a marriage, a dashed line marks a stepchild, and a cross marks a death. The joined lines over Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa mark them as twins.

Each family on the Joy Luck Club family tree has its own coloured ring, red for the Woos, blue for the Hsus, green for the Jongs and purple for the St. Clairs. The husbands from outside the families stand without a ring. The arrows from An-mei to Rose and from Ying-ying to Lena are the advice of the last section, and the orange zigzags are the quarrels of the second section.

To build a Joy Luck Club family tree of your own, open the chart in the editor from this page or start from the story charts. The symbols are set out in the genogram symbols.