Character Development: Lessons from Amy Tan

By Beth Kephart

In the early pages of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, we meet Jing-Mei Woo shortly after her mother’s death. In taking her mother’s place at a mah-jong table, Jing-Mei learns that her mother’s friends have raised $1200 so that Jing-Mei might go to China and meet the half sisters her mother was forced, by war, to leave behind as infant twins so many years ago. “You must tell them about her life,” these friends insist, but Jing-Mei asserts that she doesn’t know a th...