Amy Tan’s View On Cultural Identity In The Joy Luck Club

Since a great many gifted Chinese American writers sprung up in the1970s, themarginalized Chinese American literature has earned more recognition from theAmerican main society. With the American nationality and the ethnic root, the ChineseAmerican writers view their own experiences and the outside world from some uniqueperspectives. They tend to write about their understandings of Chinese culture andAmerican culture and about their thoughts of the cultural identity of the minority.As soon as Amy Tan’s representative book, The Joy Luck Club, came out in1989,she has received numerous American national awards and becomes an influentialfigure in the Chinese American literature. In The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan explores theissue of cultural identity and shows her thoughtful understanding of the minority’scultural identity. At the beginning of the novel, Amy reveals the social problem of themarginal men’s cultural identity crisis. Later, she depicts the endeavors that thecharacters make to solve this crisis during the process of identity negotiation. Finally,she also presents that the characters get out of the identity crisis and win the right toenunciate for themselves with the hybrid cultural identities.The theories employed in this thesis are mainly from Homi Bhabha who is anoutstanding representative of the post-colonialism. The reason for choosing Bhabha’stheories is that some of his ideas about the ethnic cultural identity share similaritieswith those of Amy Tan. Both of them think that the cultural identity is changeable andnegotiable. Both of them believe that cultural hybridity can give the chance for theminority to represent their cultural identities and speak for themselves.With a series of analysis and elaborations about The Joy Luck Club based upon Homi Bhabha’s post-colonial theories, the author of this thesis holds in Amy Tan’spoint of view, the ethnic cultural identities should not be fixed and single, butnegotiable and hybrid. Amy Tan’s exploration of the ethnic cultural identity canprovide some positive enlightenment for those minorities who are still confused abouttheir cultural identities.