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Foreshadowing
Part 4, Chapter 1: Magpies
Explanation and Analysis—Turtles and Magpies:
The Joy Luck Club features as many frame stories as flashbacks. Its characters exchange stories with one another, as when An-Mei and her mother sit together in her uncle’s courtyard in Part 4, Chapter 1. Watching the turtle in the pond, An-Mei’s mother shares a tale:
‘I also knew that turtle when I was a small child,’ said my mother. ‘I used to sit by the pond and watch him swimming to the surface, biting the air with his little beak. He is a very old turtle.’
I could see that turtle in my mind and I knew my mother was seeing the same one.
A parable-like frame story ensues. The tale—about a turtle that drinks human tears, and joyful magpies that spring from those same drops—entertains both An-Mei and the reader, who listens secondhand the whole while. It packages a neat moral about resilience as well: since joyful magpies will always emerge from the teardrops, the turtle reasons that it would be better to swallow sorrow itself. The mother’s story introduces An-Mei to a stoicism that prepares her for the many misfortunes to come.
Tan’s use of this frame story reinforces her work’s close ties to oral narrative and storytelling. The Joy Luck Club embraces multiple perspectives, as though generating dialogue among the chapters. Within their accounts, characters-turned-narrators take their listeners captive through their tales. Mothers like An-Mei wield such power that their daughters sometimes struggle to free themselves from the force of their stories. Rose Hsu has nightmares of being chased by Old Mr. Chou—a guardian of dreams, according to An-Mei—when she refuses to listen to her mother. The Joy Luck Club mothers exchange stories with their daughters in order to articulate their experiences. By braiding life with fiction, they also acquire a degree of control over their daughters. As Rose remarks at one point, “the power of her words was too strong.”
Related Themes:
