| Amy Tan is a famous Chinese American woman writer in American literary circle at present. Her first novel The Joy Luck Club caused an immediate sensation after its publication in the year 1989 and once remained on the list of the best-seller of the New York Times for more than 8 months. The following two novels, The Kitchen God's Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses, continued the success of The Joy Luck Club. Six years after the publication of the third novel The Hundred Secret Senses, she published her fourth novel The Bonesetter's Daughter in the year 2001, which also won the wide acclaim and praise from both ordinary readers and literary critics in America. She published her latest novel Saving Fish from Drowning in the year 2005. Nowadays, Amy Tan has become one of the representatives of Chinese American writers in the field of American literature because of her extraordinary thoughts expressed in her novels as well as her excellent writing techniques; meanwhile, she has enriched American multi-culture with her profound Oriental cultural tradition. Therefore her position has already surpassed a minority ethnic writer or a popular novel writer; instead, she has become one of the most famous first-rate writers in Western countries, particularly in America with its much promoted multi-cultural atmosphere.Her fourth novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, has strong characteristics of autobiography since it is conceived on the experiences of her own grandmother, mother as well as herself. In this novel, the author turns back to her familiar theme of mother-daughter relationship and writes about how the relationship between the bicultural, bilingual immigrants and thoroughly Americanized second generations finally becomes harmonious after fierce conflicts and contradictions. Meanwhile, the author makes use of mother-daughter relationship artfully to express her attitude towards the cultural communication between Orient and Western counties under the trend of globalization today. This novel, whose major theme concentrates on the mother-daughter relationship, both inherits and surpasses her first three novels; however our literary critical field has not paid enough attention to it.The present thesis is a tentative study of The Bonesetter's Daughter, using post-colonialist theory and feminist literary criticism with its focus on the major theme of the novel. It includes five chapters. Chapter 1 is a brief overview of the development of Chinese American literature and Amy Tan. Chapter 2 gives a literature review of the study of this novel and introduces the theoretical framework of post-colonialism, especially the concept of"Other"proposed by Edward Said; meanwhile the writing purpose of this thesis is pointed out. In Chapter 3, the concept of"Other"is applied to the analysis of the novel's major theme, i.e. mother-daughter relationship. This chapter mainly analyzes the causes of the conflicts in the relationships between two pairs of mothers and daughters in the novel. Chapter 4 analyzes how mothers and daughters reconstruct their self-identity and find their common identities which help them to reach reconciliation in their relationship since they are connected closely with each other by their common heritage and family history. The above analysis contributes to the conclusion of this study in Chapter 5, which summarizes the literary value of this novel as well as its implied realistic significance in today's trend of globalization.
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