When June attends the Joy Luck Club gathering in her mother's place, she learns the astonishing truth that her two step-sisters are still alive. The Joy Luck Club aunties (Lindo Jong, An Mei Hsu, and Ying Ying St. Clair) reveal to June that it had always been her mother's deep desire to seek out her long-lost daughters and to reunite with them. After searching for years, Su Yuan Woo had finally obtained the requisite address when her untimely death put an end to her dreams.
The Joy Luck Club aunties encourage June to finish her mother's quest and to tell her two step-sisters about the mother they never knew. To help June fulfill her mother's wishes, they collectively bequeath a gift of $1,200 to her so that she can go to Shanghai to visit her sisters. June is overwhelmed and deeply touched by their generosity but worries about how she will be able to paint an accurate picture of her mother to her step-sisters. The aunties become exasperated with June and advise her to talk to her step-sisters about her mother's intelligence, kind nature, her commitment to her family, her wonderful gift in the kitchen, and her personal aspirations in life.
June begins to feel suffocated by the high expectations of the aunties until she realizes how eager all of them are to preserve the heritage and traditions of past generations. The aunties fear that succeeding young generations of American-born Chinese will forget their important ties to the past and their history. In joining the Joy Luck Club in her mother's place, June is essentially continuing an important tradition in her Chinese community.
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