The Joy Luck Club: Dialect 1 key example

The novel’s mix of Chinese and English captures the cultural ambiguity of immigrant experience in its most immediate form. Tan acquaints the reader with a casual "Chinglish," scattering Chinese words in otherwise English-rendered prose. Rose and her family head to the beach, reliant on their “nengkan” to deliver them a fish and, later, Bing. When Ying-Ying struggles to translate, she throws up her hands and declares “shwo buchulai.” Tan recreates the patchwork of languages and idioms that fill the immigrant household.

These Chinese words present a further wrinkle. Beyond pointing out the limitations of the English language, they also differentiate themselves from a simplified version of Chinese as well. Tan retains the pinyin spellings of traditional Chinese to showcase the distinctiveness of the Taiwanese dialect. Place names like “Gwilin” and “Tientjin” or phrases such as “Syin yifu! Yidafawo!” replicate the quirks of pronunciation from an early 20th-century China. They challenge impressions of a monolithic Chinese culture by revealing the varied pronunciations and ethnic groups within the distant homeland itself. Tan’s novel speaks the language of the Chinese American immigrant and of China at large.

By committing to the page what she hears, Tan shows how her characters’ linguistic struggles can illuminate new meanings in language. The Chinese “accent”—broken as it is—forms a dialect unto itself. For An-Mei, “fate” is merely the mispronunciation of “faith”—and thereby a source of unexpected insight. Cleverly, Lindo Jong names her sons Vincent and Winston because of their aural approximations to “win cent” and “wins ton.” In a novel that slides along the axes of place and time, Tan finds meaning within and between two languages.