Research Guides: Tan, Amy: Critical Articles

Articles

Negotiating the Geography of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
Contemporary readers may also relate to the concept that past relationships must always influence present personal interactions. They may also discover ... that one's inability to translate the past may have negative implications for present and future relationships. The mother-daughter relationships in both China and the United States represented in The Joy Luck Club not only provide a link between the past and the present but also suggest how the ability, or the inability, for mothers and daughters to share geographically informed cultured stories influences both mother-daughter relationships and individual and cultural identity
A unique approach of memory narrative therapy in diasporic contexts: an analysis of The Bonesetter's Daughter and The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan.
Unlike the usual trauma situations, where narrative therapy could be utilized as a healing remedy, in diasporic context, the major errand of recalling memory for immigrants is constitution of a sense of 'self, that confirms with their national identity; and the chief mode of conveying this identity is via talk- stories. Although, recalled reminiscences are distorted and discontinuous but they facilitate the psychological redemption of afflicted trauma survivors. In the diasporic context, a distinctive stratagem is employed since there is not a will to talk with strangers in narrative therapy circles, by migrant trauma victims; this typical technique would secure a sense of national identity among migrants. This study is an investigation of a unique strategy of narrative therapy in diasporic context, in major novels of Amy Tan, as a second generation of Chinese migrants.
Reading Amy Tan's hologram: the Hundred Secret Senses
In Amy Tan's novel The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), the world of yin and the world of yang are presented adjacently and ambiguously. As Laura Shapiro observes, Tan's book is somewhat like a hologram: "turn it this way and find Chinese-Americans shopping and arguing in San Francisco; turn it that way and the Chinese of Changmian village in 1864 are fleeing into the hills to hide from the rampaging Manchus." (1) Readers can easily find cross-references of the same personae and their reincarnations in both yin and yang existences. As we move deeper into the heart of the book, we find that the yin/yang hologram produces a rebounding circularity that indicates an endless narrative recursion in which the narrative levels are relative without a clear hierarchy.

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