This first section begins with a story, in which a woman remembers how she bought an expensive swan that had originally been a duck that stretched its neck.

The woman carries the swan on a ship to America, where she believes that she can someday give it to her daughter. In America, authorities take the swan away, leaving only a feather. The woman does not tell her daughter about the feather because she is waiting until she can do so in perfect English.

The story takes place in the late 1980s. Jing-Mei, nicknamed June, describes how her Chinese-born mother Suyuan died suddenly two months earlier. Now Jing-Mei is expected to take her mother’s place in the Joy Luck Club, a social club founded by her mother with three other immigrant women soon after arriving in San Francisco from China in 1949.

Suyuan told Jing-Mei many times about how she had originally founded the Joy Luck Club in China during the Japanese occupation of Kweilin. Suyuan devised a club to share food and play mahjong to help forget the terrible conditions of the occupation. Suyuan once told Jing-Mei that she lost her twin babies when she fled the city but she did not tell her the whole story.