The Joy Luck Club (1993)

Re-enforcing stereotype

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Aug 14, 2007

Pros: Asian people on TV

Cons: RE-enforcing stereotype. Adapted for white audience. Doesn't do the Asian community justice. Equating white with independence.

The net effect of the Joy Luck Club -- which could more aptly have been titled Joyless, Luckless Club -- is to reinforce existing strereotypes in which Asian life is miserable and cheap and Asian women are plentiful and available in the absence of vi...rile, sympathetic Asian males. What's more, it subtly supports the notion that the faults of white males are superficial, even cute, and easily correctible (i.e., learning to use chopsticks, learning not to slop soy sauce on the mother-in-law's culinary masterpiece) while Asian males are incorrigible sadists and hopeless geeks. An Asian girl -- or boy for that matter -- would likely come away from the movie thinking that anything is preferable to marrying an Asian and suffering unrelenting misery. All this is made worse by the fact that the movie is directed by an Asian American though Tan's book was adapted for the screen by a veteran Hollywood screenwriter who probably had much to do with making the changes calculated to make the movie play to white audiences (like making the miserable tightwad, a White in the book, an Asian). Putting Wayne Wang's name on the thing as director says it's okay to look at Asians as a race of women without men. Read more Less