Tan 19
“I can never remember things I didn’t understand in the first place"
Tan 22
"Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear"
Tan 23
"We were the lucky ones”
The group of four women being the lucky ones eating oranges with “wormy holes” and “spots” brings the state of their surroundings into stark contrast and view. Also this call out echos the name of the club, that being Joy Luck, where the women are joyful, because they feel and are lucky
Tan 25
”That hope was our only joy"
Tan 26
"You are not those babies”
The image of the mother giving up even her two babies in order to flee is a powerful one. It means that she literally could not care for them anymore and that it would be suicide to not
Tan 30
”You can’t have luck when someone else has skill”
In the end Jing-Mei’s mother no matter how lucky she was, in the end did not end up being completely safe, and had to give up her children to stay alive
Tan 37
”We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more”
Tan 41
”They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds ‘joy luck’ is not a word, it does not exist”
This fear of all of the mothers pushes them to give the money to June in order to have her try to reconnect with her heritage and realize the importance of that heritage. As well as the fact that those daughters do not realize how lucky they are to the point where they do not know how being without joy or luck can push them past their breaking points. How retaining those two critical ideals thought difficult times will push them forwards, and the importance of actively maintaining them and not just wallowing in the deceptive comfort of passivity.