The Art Of Amy Tan's Writing: A Study Of Her Themes And Narrative Strategies

With the great success of The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, Amy Tan has become one of the representatives of Chinese American literature. The Joy Luck Club, Tan's debut novel, is a narrative about the conflicts between Chinese mothers and Americanized daughters. Tan adopts traditional Chinese narrative structures, and the talk story tradition to present many vivid pictures of Chinese Americans' lives.Her second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, continues her exploration of mother-daughter relationship. However, different from her first novel, it concentrates on a single mother-daughter relationship. Tan keeps on writing about herself, her mother and things she is familiar with. When her third novel came out, Tan turns to write about the spiritual world, from the mother-daughter relationship to sisterhood. Then in her latest book, she turns back to her familiar theme of the mother-daughter relationship at her own mother's death.Tan's works are rich in themes. The major themes in Tan's works are the conflicts between the bicultural, bilingual immigrant and thoroughly Americanized second generation, the trope of journey as discovery and reconciliation, and also death and life. She pays great attention to the understanding and communication between two generations, which is also the aim of her creation. Through her writing, she wants to prove the possibilities for people from different cultural backgrounds to live peacefully together.In Tan's works, we can see the perfect combination of tradition and reality, and the reproduction of history. Tan is greatly influenced both by traditional Chinese culture and literature and by western culture and literature, which makes her works a good representation of both of them and herself a literary or cultural communicator between the Chinese and the Americans.