Cultural Conflict in Amy Tan's Novels: Chinese Heritage and American Modernity

Abstract

Through the personal prism of familial ties, Amy Tan's novels regularly depict the conflict and negotiation between Western, particularly American, modernism and Chinese cultural traditions. Her books feature second-generation women who grow up in a secular, individualistic, English-speaking United States and first-generation Chinese immigrants who carry with them memories of war, sexism, and superstition. This paper examines how Amy Tan's key works, including The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and The Hundred Secret Senses, address cultural differences. By focusing on recurrent themes such as mother-daughter conflict, food, language, miscommunication, superstition, gender roles, and the quest for selfhood, the analysis demonstrates how Amy Tan's characters progressively transition from rejecting, confusing, or being ashamed of Chinese culture to more nuanced, hybrid identities. The books depict culture as a dynamic process of translation, reinterpretation, and selective inheritance rather than a straightforward East-versus-West dichotomy. In the end, Amy Tan's work implies that while cultural differences cannot be eliminated, they can become a source of creativity and resilience when characters learn to hear each other's experiences across generational and cultural barriers.