Informational essay

Film VS Text Joy Luck Club

“Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different  (Stephen King). These are wise words by Stephen King, but when we compare the book The Joy Luck Club written by Amy tan and its movie directed by Wayne Wang that is not the case. The quote is saying that yes movies and books are in the same category of entertainment but are so different and give a completely different feeling.Wang did a phenomenal job at making the movie The Joy Luck Club very similar to the book. Throughout the film, there are only a few things that fluctuate from the book, such as the order of the mother-daughter stories, Ying ying’s story, and Lindo’s story.

   In the book, the stories were told by all of the mothers, then all the daughters and finally, then all of the mothers again. As one can imagine that was difficult to keep up with and to remember which mother belonged to each daughter. In the film, the director told the stories in mother-daughter pairs making it flow better and was easier to keep up with. Also in the film, all of the mothers and daughters tell their stories while they are at a party together. This made it easier to keep track of which story corresponded to each mother or daughter, while in the book, it had become confusing. Ying-ying developed complete hatred for her husband when she realized what an evil man he was. She wanted to get rid of him completely from her life, but she was carrying his baby, so she got an abortion and told them to throw the baby in the river. This was portrayed differently in the movie where she drowned her baby in a bath tub. “He felt so light when I held him in my arms because his spirit was gone and mine had gone with him” ( Wang direc).  Wang did this instead of having her have an abortion because he wanted to make sure the audience did not get confused when Ying ying later said, “I had no spirit to give my daughter”(Wang direc). Since were able to understand why she felt she had no spirit because of her killing her baby the audience was not confused by the fact that she felt her daughter did not get one from her.

   Lindo was engaged to a man at the age of two and when her family's home was destroyed and then she went to go live with him. “...that was how I learned to be an obedient wife” (Tan 50).  In the novel , she was there for a few years and learned how to be the perfect housewife and learned everything about the rich family she lived with. This greatly impacted her life in the novel  because she learned how to be crafty and she learned how to be a hard worker and be obedient. In the movie, she got married to him right away and got out of the house much quicker, which took away the time she had in the book to plot and learn to be a perfect housewife. That took away the effect of how she had to live because in the book she lived there for years. “I came to think of Tyan-yu as a god” (Tan 51),  her life began to revolve around what they thought about her and she worked hard for years to make them happy and to be the perfect housewife.[Add analysis] Conclusion sentence?

3rd body paragraph?  

 The Movie The Joy Luck club was very close to the movie and it was hard to pick out the differences. Most of the differences made were  alterations madefor the audience to keep up and understand the story better.

Works Cited
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam's, 1989. Print.
Wang, Wayne, dir. The Joy Luck Club. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Inc., 1993. Film.