Stories From the Heart : The plot lines of the characters of the ‘Joy Luck Club’ strike a chord with the film’s Asian-American cast

The eight stars of Hollywood Pictures’ “The Joy Luck Club” are gathered in a hotel suite near the Los Angeles airport. Three of the actresses who play the film’s Chinese-American daughters, Ming-Na Wen, Rosalind Chao and Lauren Tom, are madly drying each other’s hair in the bathroom, giggling self-consciously as a photographer tries to capture their images in the mirror.

In the main room, Tamlyn Tomita, “Joy Luck’s” fourth daughter, is wandering around in a slinky black gown, barefoot, asking “Have you seen my shoes?” Tsai Chin, who plays Tomita’s mother in the movie, unearths a pair of platform sandals from beneath the cushions of her chair, calling out, “Here’s a pair,” in an amused voice.

France Nuyen, Lisa Lu and Kieu Chinh, the actresses who portray the mothers of the other girls, sit together on the sofa, sipping tea and chatting like long-lost friends while makeup artists hover over them with brushes and powder.

“You see, this is how it was when we were filming,” Kieu Chinh confides, amid the hubbub.

Tsai Chin, who traveled from her home in London for the interview, appears genuinely delighted to see Tomita, saying, “Now I have a daughter. She’s my film daughter, but Tamlyn is like my own. We are constantly in touch and we write, ‘Dear Mother, Dear Daughter.’ I’m glad that her real mother is not jealous.”

The camaraderie between the eight actresses is unusual in the movie business but extraordinarily similar to the relationships between the first and second generation Chinese-American characters in “The Joy Luck Club.” The screenplay, written by Amy Tan, the author of the best-selling novel, and Ron Bass, adroitly captures the book’s central theme of the difficulties and benefits of being from two cultures. Although the novel was translated into 19 languages, the story of the generational conflicts of four young women struggling to be successful American citizens while coming to grips with their Chinese heritage--as personified by their mothers--is uniquely American.

The mothers have gathered at a weekly mah-jongg game in San Francisco, known as the Joy Luck Club, for as long as their daughters can remember. There they relive their tumultuous pasts and discuss their dreams for their daughters’ futures. Their aspirations are summed up by one mother’s wish before leaving China: “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!”

The movie of “The Joy Luck Club” is unique in providing an unheard-of number of meaty roles for Asian actresses. In addition to the eight stars of the film, there are other parts for actresses playing the mothers as young women in China and their own mothers.

This is not a costume drama about the exotic East. The film, directed by Wayne Wang (“Chan is Missing,” “Dim Sum”), focuses on the realistic lives of modern Asian-Americans.

“Doing this movie was kind of like we were racers in an Olympic Games relay and we got to pass the baton to each other,” says Tom, who plays Lena. “The reality of it is that we usually audition against each other. But this was a really great camaraderie where we said, OK, we’re going to focus all of our creativity on this one project and see if we can make something beautiful.”

The eight lead actresses won their roles during auditions with 400 Asian actors. Although they may not be familiar to the general public, they are well known to Asian audiences and have accomplished backgrounds.

Lu, who starred with Jimmy Stewart in “The Mountain Road,” has published a book of her own translations of Chinese plays and is a respected journalist for the Voice of America radio network, World Screen magazine and the China Times newspaper. Besides her career as an actress, Chin has written an autobiography, “Daughter of Shanghai,” taught at Tufts University and directed theater in London and China.

Nuyen, who plays Ying Ying in “The Joy Luck Club,” originated the title role in “The World of Suzie Wong” on Broadway and has starred in many films since her debut as Liat in the movie of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific.” She now squeezes acting jobs into her schedule as a professional therapist for abused women and children.

The other actresses are all currently working on other film and theater projects.

The movie opens with a party for June (Ming-Na Wen), who is about to leave for China. While the other characters eat and gossip, June is asked to take the place of her late mother, Suyuan (Kieu Chinh), at the mah-jongg table and the characters’ stories unfold in vignettes going backward and forward in mothers’ and daughters’ lives.

A flashback explaining June’s insecurity, which began with her childhood failure as a pianist, was one of the many plot lines that struck a chord with the actresses.

“Oh--the piano playing was a big thing,” laughs Rosalind Chao, who plays Rose in the film. “Walk up to any Asian-American and you’ll find a pianist. My mom was so into it that she told my little brother that if he learned to play the piano, he’d get a suit like Liberace.”

Lu, who plays An Mei, Rose’s mother, sounds much like her character in the film as she explains: “When my daughter was younger we forced her into music and she used to rebel against it. She would say: “Why can’t I go out and play with my classmates?’ and ‘Why do I have to stay home and practice every day?’ But now, after all these years, she told me she is really grateful for the discipline that (it) taught her. Because without that discipline, she would not have the foundation for her later life.”

Wen related to her character’s lack of confidence. “When I moved to New York from China (she was 4 at the time) there were these incredible insecurities. Not being able to speak English, not really fitting in, not knowing the Pledge of Allegiance, you know? Then we were uprooted again from New York to Pittsburgh, which was an extremely suburban environment. I was the only Asian in school and had to try to fit in. I totally understand June because she’s trying to deal with a generation gap with her parents that everyone deals with--it’s so universal--but she’s also dealing with being Westernized and being brought up in a very Chinese background at the same time and trying to figure out, well what am I? Am I Chinese? Or am I American?”

“My parents were very involved with Peking opera,” says Chao, who grew up in Orange. “They had a Peking Opera Club that was very much like the Joy Luck Club. My mother would compare me to her friend’s daughter, who was also in the opera. They got together every Sunday and sang and my mom played the Chinese violin. I remember my friends would come over to our house and I would be mortified because people would be playing this Chinese opera music and to 13-year-old kids, it sounded like cats in heat. I was always embarrassed.”

“I guess the similarity I felt was like Ming says--the sense of being an outsider,” adds Tom, who has some of the most painfully humorous scenes in the movie as a daughter trying to keep her marriage to an incredibly cheap, insensitive husband together.

“My character is a little bit invisible and shy and I was in that space also when I was very young,” Tom says. “Just your basic kid stuff--people calling me names. We were the only Asian family in Highland Park, Ill. And my dad was like, ‘You have to marry an Asian or I’m going to disown you.’ I’m like, ‘Dad, who?’ There wasn’t anybody for me to even look at--give me a break!”

“Oh the disowning! That’s a real Chinese thing,” Wen interjects, bursting into laughter. “You always get disowned!”

Chinh has darker reasons for relating to her character, June’s mother Suyuan. Suyuan is tormented by the knowledge that she was forced to leave her twin infant daughters in China when she fled the Japanese occupation during World War II. In real life, Chinh was also a refugee--twice. At 14, she fled North Vietnam for the south alone. Her mother was dead, her sister was in France and although her father and brother were alive, they could not escape the North. Despite the odds, Chinh established a successful career as an actress in South Vietnam. When it became apparent that North Vietnam might win the war, Chinh sent her own children to safety in Canada. When Saigon fell in 1975, she became a refugee once more.

Chinh left the country on the last Pan Am flight out of Saigon, with only the clothes on her back, a lipstick and some useless Vietnamese piasters. On landing in Singapore, she was arrested and given 24 hours to leave the country or be forcibly returned to Vietnam. A confusing series of flights from Singapore through Hong Hong, Korea, Japan and Paris finally brought her to Toronto, where she was reunited with her children. Two years later she entered the United States under the sponsorship of actress Tippi Hedren, whom Chinh had met on a television show she hosted in Vietnam. She is now a naturalized American citizen.

“Since my father pushed me on that plane when I was 14, I never saw him or my brother again. It is 39 years now,” Chinh says, wistfully. “When people ask me, ‘Can you cry in that scene?’ I ask the director to give me one moment. So that in one quick moment I just flash back to my own life. I have to leave my children in the movie, but in my real life I have to leave my father when I was young and later on, I also have to leave my children. Mother and children separated, evacuation, refugees--this is what my own life is about. It helped my acting because you know exactly how it felt before. But yet, it’s painful to have to live it again. When you go home from the set, you live all that again.”

“I think Wayne cast everybody very close to the character they’re playing, so almost no acting is required,” says Lu, with perhaps too much modesty.

Despite their many successes outside mainstream Hollywood movies, the actresses see “The Joy Luck Club” as a breakthrough. It marks the first time that a major studio has financed a film in which the majority of the cast, the director, the film editor, the costume designer and two of the producers (Tan and executive producer Janet Yang) are Asian, and it offers an opportunity for Asian women to be seen in a more honest, well-rounded light.

Nuyen explains that Asian women have “always been the exotic vignette. It’s almost like being a piece of jade. You have the feeling that you are a piece of jewelry. A fine stone, but from over there. However, in this movie, I do believe that the roles of the daughters, in particular, have a great deal of humanity and self-awareness in them. There are human needs that are regardless of race, or creed or whatever. In that sense, this could be good material to break barriers.”

“The good thing about ‘Joy Luck’ is that you’re able to see women who are three-dimensional,” adds Chao. “We’re not victims, we’re not femme fatales . It’s not a cartoon image of what Asian women are. A lot of times when you think of Asians, you think of them from an immigrant standpoint. You don’t see--like Lauren, me, Tamlyn and Ming--the next generation because we’re usually playing somebody with an accent. I think it also shows that there is a core of talent out there. It is an entirely Asian-American movie.”

Tomita, who plays Waverly, a driven, yuppyish career woman, liked the fact that the daughters were portrayed as typical modern women. “Being Asian, along with other ethnic groups, it’s more difficult (to) get into those roles where you’re seen first as people,” she notes.

“I think that is what all ethnic actors aspire to--to just play a woman who falls in love, or works as a clerk, or whatever--and then, if you want to, to have that luxury to bring in the cultural heritage,” Tomita says. “But we have to cover so much ground after years of being seen in certain stereotypes. It takes a lot of work to strip that away and I see ‘The Joy luck Club’ as a step in that process. I think that the story of mothers and daughters is so universal. I keep getting the comment, “That’s exactly like my mother--she happens to be Jewish.”

Chin laughs as Tomita says this, noting, “That’s just what Lindo is like: a Jewish Mother. She is manipulative and sometimes unforgiving, but with a sense of humor to succeed. I think traditionally, Chinese parents, as I remember with my own, always want their children to do well because life always had been and still is hard.”

Unlike other recent films that have pointed out the differences between ethnic groups, “Joy Luck” is about the commonalities among them. Miscommunication and the generation gap are two of the main topics engaged by the screenplay. As Tomita points out, “It’s all about the eternal conflict between parents and children. And when you mix in the cultural differences and understand that these mothers can’t communicate the feelings that they have for their daughters, something simple like love gets misinterpreted.”

Asked whether racism has had much effect on her career, Wen says, “It’s not as much racism as a lack of awareness. This film is going to be a milestone because I don’t think most people, particularly in the Midwest, have an image of Asian-Americans speaking without an accent. Leading normal lives, having normal families, dealing with problems that everybody else has. Just updating the image is a tremendous benefit.”

“I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish about it, but my attitude is that you’re aware of inequities and the racism that goes on in the world of casting, but to just keep focusing on the positive has enabled me to get parts that are cross-over,” adds Tom, whose latest role, in “Mr. Jones” with Richard Gere, was not originally written for an Asian-American.

“I think ‘The Joy Luck Club’ will be a great, concrete, tangible example of what we’ve been trying to say. To me, it doesn’t work to just keep griping about negative images. You have to keep focusing on positive images and this is a perfect example of it.”