Memory, Translation, and Mobility: Hybrid Identity Practices in Amy Tan’s Postcolonial Narratives

Abstract

Amy Tan theorises, dramatises, and complicates hybridity and cultural negotiation as lived practices of identity formation across generations, languages, geographies, and political regimes in her six major novels: The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), and The Valley of Amazement (2013). This paper makes the case, drawing on postcolonial and transnational frameworks, that Amy Tan's work positions diasporic subjects in intersubjective spaces mother/daughter, sister/sister, tourist/local, where translation, superstition, trauma, and storytelling serve as mediating technologies of hybrid identity. Amy Tan's work stages "being" and "becoming" as dynamic negotiations between ancestral memory and modern adaptation.
The reading generates three claims: first, that Amy Tan's distinctive mother-daughter architecture exemplifies an ethics of hybridity based on intergenerational discourse; second, that Amy Tan's subsequent transnational turn expands hybrid negotiation from domestic ethnic relations to cross-border, geopolitical encounters; and third, that Amy Tan's narrative poetics frame tales, spectral narration, and polyphonic structure perform hybridity both thematically and formally. In addition to providing careful readings of significant passages in each book, the study synthesises critical knowledge on Chinese American literature, diaspora, hybridity, and transnationalism. Amy Tan is reframed in the end as a cultural negotiation theorist and novelist whose works shed light on the ways in which memory, mediation, and movement are used to re-author identities.