Staging the Reception of American Ethnic Authors in Women’s Popular Magazines: Encountering Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club Stories in Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal

Abstract

This article investigates how Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club penetrated the mainstream with the help of magazines read by millions of women and teenage girls. Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal first published two stories from the book that were edited to isolate the relationships between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. This emphasis in turn simplified the stories’ representation of Chinese-American families and peer groups, offering a way for the magazines to appeal to their audiences’ existing cultural assumptions. The book’s title story as edited for Ladies’ Home Journal celebrates an adult daughter’s renewed interest in her mother’s traditions, and the version of “The Rules of the Game” that appeared in Seventeen champions a talented young daughter asserting her independence from her mother. In addition to the reception of these stories in the context of women’s magazines, the article considers readers’ responses to The Joy Luck Club book—an example of a short story cycle by an ethnic American author. Audiences outside the academy have found it difficult to read across interlinking stories, which limits their level of engagement with the text. The demanding fictional form of Tan’s book, much like the truncated magazine versions of the stories, may actually encourage shallow interpretations of the struggles of its ethnic American characters.