As Amy Tan grew up, she longed to be apart of the American melting pot. She wanted to cross the generation bridge to fill the gap between traditional American and Chinese ways. Tan produces her novels using a method of narration based on Chinese oral tradition, called “talk story” which makes it possible to identify the misunderstandings within generational relationships. With the narrative framework of mother daughter relationship, she manages to incorporate two cultures into one forming a Chinese-American identity. Tan’s narrative style creates a bridge for the gap between Chinese mothers and Americanized daughters.
Amy Tan was born into a Chinese-American family and lived through traumatic experiences growing up, which are apparent in her novels. As she grew up she moved sporadically, “Tan’s mother moved the family to Europe in hopes of changing the family luck” (Feng para 2). When Tan was fourteen years old, she discovered the existence of her Chinese half sister that was much like the character Jing-mei who discovers her lost twin sisters in The Joy Luck Club. In addition to the appearance of a sibling, she experienced her first traumatic loss when her father passed away of a brain tumor when she was fifteen years old. Sadly the Tan family experienced further bad luck when they moved back to the states because her sixteen year old brother died from a brain tumor six months after her father’s passing. It seemed as if the bad luck never vanished, therefore the pain from her losses was the background of her novels The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. Aside from her early childhood challenges, Tan continued her studies in the states constantly moving to different colleges. As a highschool graduate, she didn’t know what major she wanted to study, “after leaving Europe from graduating high school she went to Linfield college to study pre-med, a decision made by her mother” (Hunter para 2). Surprisingly after one year at Linfield college, she moved with her boyfriend to San Jose and enrolled into their university to study an english and linguistics major. Throughout the years, she earned her bachelor’s degree in english and master’s in linguistics all while marrying her boyfriend, Lou DeMattei. In 1976, Tan accepted a job with the Alameda County Association for Retarded Citizens as a language development consultant which was a leading job to further her career. She started writing to cure her compulsive work habits and unfortunately failed at psychoanalytic counseling which made her join a writers group. Nine months into her writing short stories, “these stories eventually developed into The Joy Luck Club (1989) and launched Tan into a brilliant literary career” (Feng para 3). The Joy Luck Club earned a Silver Medal from the Commonwealth Club at the California Book Awards, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award for Fiction, and the American Library Association’s Best Book for Young Adults award. Those awards prompted her to be one of the country’s most popular authors that induced her creative writing full-time. Tan’s traumatic experiences growing up developed the start of her writing career because she wrote her novels through personal experience to cure her grief.
Tan’s novels propose a feminist perspective to accomplish the obstacles that women are afraid to overcome in racist and sexist societies. While reading her novels, “it is suggestive of a new way to look at narrative beginnings, one that emphasizes a destabilization of conceptions of history that exclude women, particularly those of non-European descent” (Romangnolo para 2). The narrative beginnings promotes a new perspective to the authentic origin. They encourage interrogation for the origins of Asian American female subjects between European and Asian American culture. Critics said, “Tan has forged a career out of the exploration of different kinds of woman-to-woman relationships, which accounts for her popularity with a female readership, but has also led to her being criticised for the “sugar sisterhood” elements of her writing” (Grice para 5). Tan argued that people are too focused on female identity with a feminist perspective that they are blindsided by the fact that Chinese politics and history is present in her work. Female identity itself became a metaphor for feminism in twentieth- century Chinese legacies which she writes upon. Another problem arose, “moreover, doing so illuminates the discursive constructedness of authenticity, origins, and identity, thereby problematizing reductive cultural representations of female, American, and Asian American subjectivity” (Romangnolo para 3). Building on The Joy Luck Club, its Asian American literature and subjectivity have frequently been misread. Although there are different perspectives, Tan gives one way to create a concept about the origins of these cultures through female identities. Her novels spoke as a voice for females who were involved in racist or sexist societies.
A huge theme of Tan’s novels are mother-daughter relationships seen through generational differences. From personal experiences, “Amy Tan’s novels portray the nuances of the mother-daughter interrelationship, such as maternal love and expectations, generational and cultural conflicts, and reconciliation, with the sensibility and precision stemming from her personal experiences” (Feng para 1). She chose to write about mother-daughter relationships to address the interrogation of women from the west. Through personal experiences she draws from generational gaps between Chinese mothers and Americanized daughters. Adding to her background culture, “strategically too this theme is central to Western women in that it explores the twin poles of the daughter’s desire for individuation, wherein she demands an identity as separate from her mother, which clashes with her intense and fierce attachment to and sense of continuum with her mother’s life” (Mohanram para 2). Tan wrote on mother-daughter relationships, rather than father-son ones, to give a deeper meaning to the woman in the interrogation of origins. It was a theme only explored by those who are entitled to that property. Thus mother-daughter relationships combined with the cultures of the old country get played out in the overarching theme of identity. Additionally, “in this foregrounding of mothers as daughters, Tan reveals her ploy, wherein she wrests this particular theme from the Western tradition and locates it squarely within China” (Mohanram para 4). Tan wrote about mother- daughter exploration of the old country and new world exploring the chinese part of Chinese-American identity. The mother-daughter dyads became a metaphor for the relationship between China and the U.S. The generational relationships are being portrayed as representatives of traditional Chinese and modern American traditions, but Tan places equal weight on both sides of the hyphenated Chinese-American.
In Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, she writes upon specific childhood memories through different characters. In The Joy Luck Club, Tan frequently draws on her own family experiences. Including her own family, “Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is about the ethnic malaise of four families in San Francisco” (Zeng 5). A personal experience was seen through Jing-mei’s mother, Suyuan Woo, who abandoned two daughters in China. It was a replication of the experience of Tan’s mother who had to leave three children behind in China. As Tan’s family moved to the states they managed to incorporate Chinese ideals, “the four Chinese immigrant mothers, who have formed a mahjong group called the Joy Luck Club and cherished ideologies of old China, and their four American-born daughters who believe in modern American individuality and independence”(Zeng 5). Their mother’s in the states tried to incorporate Chinese ideals to influence their Americanized daughters. The four families were friends with the Tan’s and had the same mother daughter conflict because of generation differences. Desires to do something off the lines of Chinese tradition, “Jing-Mei Woo confesses to her self-protective strategy against her mother: “I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight A’s. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college” (Tan, 1989, pp. 153-54)” (Zeng 7). Through Jing-Mei Woo, Tan expresses her experiences where she disappointed her mother because she failed to follow the Chinese traditions. An example of a personal experience was when Tan rejected her mother’s orders to pursue pre-med and instead studied an english major. Tan longed to be apart of the American melting pot so she desired to do American activities that her mother did not agree with.
Tan’s novels incorporate stylistic devices such as talk-story and flashback. Talk story stems from chinese oral tradition. To describe talk-story, “Tan uses writing techniques introduced by other Asian American writers, including Maxine Hong Kingston: she combines Western and Eastern storytelling methods, her novels explore Chinese and Chinese American life over many centuries in a nonlinear fashion, and her primary literary device comes from the honored and ancient Chinese tradition of communication called “talk story”” (Soitos para 24). Tan utilizes “talk- story” with cultures and generations to differentiate language and time. A frame story organizes these tales by tying different perspectives of American and Chinese traditions as a whole. Talk story eventually creates a sum for all its parts, “the criticism about Tan’s works centers on the way that the dialogic nature of talk-story functions either to create or to bridge gaps between bicultural, bilingual immigrant mothers and their Americanized second-generation daughters” (Dunick para 2). Talk-story promotes multiple levels of misunderstanding between both Chinese-speaking mothers and English-speaking daughters and between persons who speak different Chinese dialects. Tan’s works present literacy and writing in order to reveal the critical problems with identifying non-Western narratives only through an understanding of oral traditions. Another literary device used throughout Tan’s novels is flashback. Tan’s personal experiences are, “the haunting power of past memories, intensified in traumatic incidents, forces the individuals to create an eligible picture of past; this would ensure a secured sense of ‘self’” (Lofti para 2). There are resemblances between Amy Tan’s personal life and the lives that she pictures, in her narratives are allusions to her grandmother’s suicide which are traceable in The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Bonesetter’s Daughter. The Bonesetter’s Daughter narrates mother-daughter conflicts in an Asian- American family, where the mother’s past is the key to healing mental injuries of the present. Sharing memories from the diasporic communities creates redemption for the nostalgic, haunting memories. The stylistic devices seen throughout her novels uses Chinese oral tradition with incorporated personal experiences.
Amy Tan wrote upon her wish to fill the gap between generational American and Chinese relationships. She used writing styles composed of flashbacks and talk-story which stem off personal experiences and chinese oral tradition. Tan’s theme of mother-daughter relationships build Chinese-American identity, but bring a rise to feminist opinions. Her novels propose a bridge for all races to walk upon into the American melting pot.