After her novel The Joy Luck Club became a literary blockbuster, author Amy Tan had to struggle to get it produced in Hollywood. Before the movie was released, one film executive complained to Chris Lee, the Chinese American president of Columbia TriStar, that there were “no Americans” in The Joy Luck Club. Lee retorted, “There are Americans in it. They just don’t look like you.” (Chang 392)

Footnote 66: The Joy Luck Club interwove Tan’s family history with the fictional stories of four American women and their immigrant Chinese mothers. No other novel by an Asian American writer had achieved such success in the history of publishing—it topped the New York Times best-seller list and sold 4.5 million copies by 1997. The film appeared in 1993, directed by Wayne Wang and based on a screenplay co-written by Tan and Ron Bass.