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".
Ying-Ying accidentally drowns her infant son in the film due to her depression, being married to the abusive and cheating Lin-Xiao. In the novel, she had an abortion and never gave birth to her son, as she didn't want to have a child with a man she absolutely hated. This part of the novel was partly influenced by a dark secret Amy Tan's real mother told her, where she had three abortions while living in China.
Margaret Cho said this book "changed the way I feel about Asian American history. It made me feel validated."