an employs an intricate and piquant irony to develop these themes. Irony especially surrounds Lindo. An immigrant, Lindo is a proud repository of traditional Chinese values, which she nostalgically proclaims as superior to the values of the United States. One of her tenets is that strong people should remain silent, a behavioral strategy she inherits from Sunzi’s classic Sunzi Bingfa (probably 475-221 b.c.e.; Sun Tzu: On the Art of War, 1910); as Lindo indicates in another tale in The Joy Luck Club, her maiden name is Sun. Ironically, however, when Waverly is featured on the cover of Life magazine, Lindo cannot keep silent about her daughter’s prowess and pridefully