The Joy Luck Club

So I was perusing the used paperbacks section at Monroe Library where you leave an old paperback of yours and take another that someone else left behind. I saw a copy of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, which has been recommended to me by several friends. So, I broke the rules and took a book without leaving one behind, but I promise I'll return this book when I'm done, so the net loss to the paperback exchange will be 0. Anyhow, I was pretty reluctant to read this...or pretty much any female writers that receive a lot of female support, haha. It's not that I think they're bad writers or anything, but what they often write about that connects so well with the female audience doesn't relate to me (Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Danielle Steele [ok that's a special case], etc). But as soon as I read the prologue to The Joy Luck Club, I was hooked, just like I was for The Da Vinci Code. Only in this case, it's really beautiful writing (at least to me) rather than an exciting story, as was the case with DaVC, that drew me in. Without further ado (what exactly does "ado" mean anyways?), here is the prologue to The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look! - it is too beautiful to eat. Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: "In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan - a creature that became more than what was hoped for." But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leaving the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind. Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, "This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions." And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.