Anecdotes

In a 2018 NPR interview, executive producer Janet Yang recalled that director Wayne Wang (who she said usually had "the most lovely personality") lost his temper in a marketing meeting because the studio had presented him with the choices for posters to advertise the movie, and all of the options avoided showing the face of an Asian person. Either the designs were very abstract (for example, a decorative woodcut) or they were photos of the actresses' backs.

Amy Tan's mother had a previous marriage to another man in China, with whom she bore four children, a son and three daughters. Her son died as a toddler, and she was forced to leave her remaining daughters behind in Shanghai to immigrate to the states. Tan eventually met her half-sisters when she and her mother traveled to Shanghai in 1987. This incident was the basis for Tan's first novel The Joy Luck Club, which was adapted to this film.

In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Margaret Cho said this book "changed the way I feel about Asian American history. It made me feel validated."

The conscious choice to include voice-over narration was to compress as many details as possible from the original novel into the film without changing the overall plot.