It was directed by Wayne Wang and stars Tsai Chin, Kieu Chinh, Lisa Lu, France Nuyen, Rosalind Chao, Lauren Tom, Tamlyn Tomita, and Ming-Na Wen.

[3] Four older women, all Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, meet regularly to play mahjong, eat, and tell stories.

The film reveals the hidden pasts of the older women and their daughters, and how their lives are shaped by the clash of Chinese and American cultures as they strive to understand their family bonds and one another.

Carolco Pictures initially supported the project until 1990, when the filmmakers turned down the contract for not receiving the creative control that they demanded.

The Joy Luck Club was formed by four women in San Francisco: Lindo Jong, Ying-Ying St. Clair, An-Mei Hsu, and Suyuan Woo.

[7] The film's present-day setting is June's farewell surprise party in San Francisco for her upcoming reunion with long-lost twin sisters in China.

She moves into their household at age fifteen while her family migrates elsewhere, spending the next four years in a childless, loveless marriage, and earning the ire of her mother-in-law for not bearing a son.

Back at June's farewell party, Rich almost successfully uses chopsticks (but accidentally drops a piece) and impresses Lindo by trying to respect Chinese table manners.

Telling An-Mei the truth about her situation, she commits suicide by eating dumplings laced with opium, choosing the day carefully to threaten Wu-Tsing with the vengeance of her angry ghost.

During the Japanese invasion of China in World War II, Suyuan Woo escapes with her twin baby daughters, but becomes ill and her cart breaks down.

After remarrying in America, Suyuan has high hopes for her new daughter, June, who falls short of her mother's expectations, in one case blundering a piano performance.

[12] When the novel, The Joy Luck Club, was released in 1989, Wayne Wang approached Amy Tan, the novel's author, with the idea of adapting the novel that he admired into a film.

[8][13] No Hollywood movies were known to have an all-Asian cast at the time,[8] and making a film with Chinese protagonists was risky especially because Asian actors were not well known to American audiences.

[13] Ronald Bass, whom Wang and Tan teamed up with since their meeting at the Hotel Bel-Air in January 1990, analyzed the novel[14] and outlined how to bring it to the screen, with "no single lead character.

[8]Wayne Wang, Amy Tan, and Ronald Bass teamed up with the Ixtlan Corporation, including its staff members, Oliver Stone and Janet Yang, who was the company's vice president and had a profound interest in the project.

[16] Wang gave Stone's thriller Year of the Dragon a negative review for portraying Chinese characters as "[mobsters], gangsters, and prostitutes."

Carolco Pictures initially agreed to support the project in spring 1990, but the company had fiscal problems, and the filmmakers turned down the contract in fall 1990 due to not receiving the level of creative control that they demanded.

[15] When they returned to Ixtlan in March 1992,[10][15] Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, approved the project as proposed by Stone and Yang, and gave them full creative control.

The producers were surprised, but Yang felt in retrospect that Joy Luck " fits in with Disney's agenda—taking a chance on low-budget projects not dependent on star power".

[8][13] Hsu Ying Li (1910–1993), who portrayed the matchmaker in the film, and worked as a culture consultant on set, was killed in a car accident in Oakland, California, on April 28, 1993.

The site's consensus states: "The Joy Luck Club traces the generational divide, unearthing universal truths while exploring lives through the lens of a specific cultural experience.

"[29] Ty Burr from Entertainment Weekly graded it a C+ and wrote that the film "covers primal issues of abandonment, infanticide, motherly love, and self-respect, pounds you with pathos[, and] is extremely faithful to the novel".

Burr found the story "exhausting" and preachy, he criticized the "cringingly bald, full of self-help blather" dialogue, and deemed male characters as "perfidies".

However, he found the acting "generous [and] intelligent", and picked the segment of Rosalind Chao and Lisa Lu as "the only one that feels genuinely cinematic [yet] too late to save the movie".

However, Denby criticized the film writing, "[I]ts tone is relentlessly earnest, its meanings limited or wanly inspirational, and my emotions, rather than well[ed] up, remained small."

Moreover, he deemed men in the film as "caricatures" and the mothers' attempts to "teach [their daughters] the lesson of self-worth" as inadequate and pretentious.

"[32] Matt Hinrichs from DVD Talk rated the film four and a half stars out of five, commenting, "Despite the cultural and gender-specific nature of the story, […] there are a lot of overriding themes explored here (such as the daughters fearing that they're repeating their moms' mistakes) that have a universal scope and appeal.

[34] The film opened to theatres at limited release in Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco on September 8, 1993.

[1][34] It slowly expanded to several hundred theatres by October 1 nationwide,[34][35] including Salt Lake City, Utah,[35] and St. Petersburg, Florida.

Flower Drum Song, released in 1961, was the first film to feature a majority Asian cast telling a contemporary Asian-American story.