The Joy Luck Club.

HARDLY had I finished reviewing M. Butterfly, when already several other Chinese or Chinese-American movies were upon us. Take The Joy Luck Club, based on Amy Tan's bestseller about four women who regularly get together to play mahjong. They were all born in China but now live in San Francisco, and each trails behind her a dread past. Each also has a daughter for whom she harbors high hopes for a good American life. And all four women had, in their murky Chinese histories, mothers whose positions were inferior even to their daughters', yet who fought tenaciously for their girlchildren.

At once you will perceive a rather too fearful symmetry in those fearsome foursomes. It takes four to play mahjong, which is how Miss Tan must have gotten the idea to do everything foursquarely by fours. Yet however this may work in the wider scope and statelier pace of the novel, a movie--even a two-and-a-half-hour one--cannot bear this much freight. The Joy Luck Club must juggle the stories of four grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and, to make it a baker's dozen, a pair of sisters, whom their mother had to abandon in China, and whom, years later, their American half-sister, June, comes to fetch to America. To make this meeting more tearjerking, the elderly sisters expected to see their and June's mother, but learn now that Mother died recently, and that half-sister June is all they get. Tears of joy proliferate nevertheless, and the movie ends awash in liquid sentiment.

June conveys their bereavement in fluent Chinese, even though when she set out for China, she spoke not a word of the language. True, she made the trip by boat, but is there a slow boat to China quite so slow as to allow acquiring that difficult language during one passage? The movie not only piles 13 heart-tugging stories on top of one another, it also dispenses with verisimilitude in sundry details. Mathematics clearly went by the board from the start. Thirteen dramas into two and a half hours means about ten minutes per sob story, and it must take a person very loose in his or her lachrymal glands to allow them to be jerked at such record speed, and with such frequency.

But things get even more complicated. Various characters are seen at as many as three stages of their lives, and it is no mean feat for a non-Chinese viewer to make the right connections between An Mei, age four, An Mei, age nine, and An Mei circa fifty or sixty, or whatever age she is at the mahjong table. So what we get here is pretty opaque, but sufficiently sentimental to qualify as an effective Sino-American soap opera, complete with exotic minority appeal.

Still there may be one positive aspect to this web of intertwined miseries. For miseries they are, despite some humor involving all these doting mothers and sometimes rebellious daughters. Matrimonial miseries, as we get three unhappy marriages: one in China, to a strikingly handsome but brutal philanderer; one in America, to a Caucasian socialite, who also cheats; and yet another in America, to a horribly Americanized Chinese capitalist, sexist, and miser. These three bad marriages serve to further idealize the mother-daughter relationship as something better and holier than that between spouses. Could this be reverse sexism?

Back to the positive aspect, however: NBC News assures us that this is the first Hollywood film in which Chinese people are presented as likable, normal human beings, even if one mother in desperate straits abandons two baby girls, and another, having no other way to get back at her brutish husband, drowns their baby in the bathtub. Yet I wonder whether, however sympathetically viewed, characters in a soap opera ever achieve enough genuine humanity to counteract all those Yellow Peril and Kung Fu stereotypes we have been plied with for so long. It will take a better screenplay than this, by Amy Tan and Ronald Bass, to do the trick.

On the other hand, most of the performances are extremely appealing, and some of the humor provides welcome leavening. Yet even the humor tends to leave a sudsy taste in your mouth. Wayne Wang has directed stylishly, and Amir Mokri's camera can wax duly poetic. And yes, it is nice to see Chinese-Americans achieve their embourgeoisement: what could be more middle-class than this movie?