The Joy Luck Club is about four Chinese mothers, who came to America when they were young, and their grown daughters who were born in the United States.

The mothers formed a club, where they play the Chinese tile game of mahjong, eat a lot of food, and talk about life.

Their stories of their youth in China are both sad and magical. The moms are filled with old-fashioned wisdom, while their daughters' lives are more modern and involve complications their mothers never dreamed of.

Because they have different ways of looking at the world, the mothers and daughters often don't see eye-to-eye, but there is a strong bond between them. Told from different points of view, the wisdom in this movie plays out in stories of love, hope, desire, and loss.

The Joy Luck Club comes rushing off the screen in a torrent of memories, as if its characters have been saving their stories for years, waiting for the right moment to share them.

That moment comes after a death and a reunion that bring the past back in all of its power, and show how the present, too, is affected - how children who think they are so very different are deeply affected by the experiences of their parents.

The movie, based on Amy Tan's 1989 best-selling novel, tells the story of four women who were born in China and eventually came to America, and of their daughters. Around these eight women circle innumerable friends and relatives, both there and here, Chinese and not, in widening circles of experience.

What is about to be forgotten are the origins of the women, the stories of how they were born and grew up in a time and culture so very different from the one they now inhabit.

The "Joy Luck Club" of the title is a group of four older Chinese ladies who meet once a week to play mahjong, and compare stories of their families and grandchildren. All have made harrowing journeys from pre-revolutionary China to the comfortable homes in San Francisco where they meet. But those old days are not often spoken about, and sometimes the whole truth of them is not known.