It requires four players to play four hands each comparably, the novel is divided into four main parts, each of which is subdivided into four separate stories, each told by a different narrator. The structure of the novel imitates the game, which is similar to the card game rummy, though played with 136 variously marked Chinese tiles. When the novel begins, June's mother has recently died, and she is about to take up "the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club" in her place. In the first part of The Joy Luck Club, we find out from our first narrator, Jing-mei Woo ("June"), that her mother and three other elderly ladies, all first-generation Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, have for many years been meeting regularly to eat together and play mah-jong. T hough it is not essential to the enjoyment of Amy Tan's geometrically structured novel, some understanding of the rules of mah-jong might help the reader appreciate its shapeliness.
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