Divided into four parts, the best-selling novel focuses on four Chinese-American immigrant families in San Francisco, California. The Joy Luck Club consists of four women feasting and playing mahjong together. Suyuan Woo creates the club to cheer up her friends during wartime in China. She restarts it after moving to the United States, with three other women of her age. The four women and their daughters share their bittersweet lives and mother-daughter relationships.

The Kitchen God's Wife (1991)

Pearl is an American-born daughter of Chinese immigrant mother Winnie. The mother and daughter have kept their secrets from each other. Aunt Helen, Winnie's friend, knows their secrets and determines to expose them, since she is dying. So Winnie begins to tell Pearl about her past from her birth in the 1920s to the desperate events that led to her arrival in the United States in 1949. She likens herself to the "Kitchen God's" wife in a Chinese fable, who endures all sufferings, receives no credit for her doings but is still strong.

Amy Tan has departed from her well-known genre of relationships between Chinese-American mothers and daughters in this picaresque novel. San Francisco art vendor Bibi Chen has arranged a vacation with her friends to Myanmar but dies mysteriously before the trip. The other set off on a cruise on Christmas morning and disappear in Myanmar. Chen watches over her friends from beyond the grave as they journey toward their fate. The title of the novel is derived from the practice of Myanmar's fishermen, who believe they are saving the fish from drowning by bringing them to the shore.