Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club: Reconsidering the Image of China within Chinese American Discourse

The article discusses the image of China as an integrant part of Amy Tan’s writings. The imagological approach to the study of Chinese American discourse, as well as discussion of the semantics and poetics of hetero-images and auto-images of Chineseness, American Chineseness, Ameri-canness, provides a comprehensive understanding of the writer’s artistic concept in representing the changing nature of the Chinese American identity. At the same time, the article seeks to open new vistas in Chinese American discourse, to focus on intrinsic textual peculiarities beyond the extrinsic ethnocentric concepts of cultural hybridity and Orientalism, which have been prevalent in academic literary surveys during the latter half of the twentieth century. A comparative approach based on imagology theory allows investigating the multiple dimensions of the ambivalent Chinese American identity through revealing the core images implicitly present in all Amy Tan’s novels. Within American circumstances, the problem of the other cultural background for Chinese American writers constitutes an essential part of their creative quest. The article thus highlights the mechanisms of literary representation of the image of China and explores the ways of artistic literary textualization of Chinese cultural facts. By considering such categories as Chineseness, American Chineseness, and Americanness through the lens of literary imagology, the article provides an interpretation of the Self and the Other distinction in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. It is argued that the image of China in this novel cannot be viewed as otherness, but as the other Self. The Joy Luck Club is not just a family saga on the life of people of Chinese origin in the American circumstances but also a true representation of a conflict between the knowledge about the world possessed by Chinese mothers and the “American knowledge” of their American-born daughters. The novel represents mutual self-reflected images of the East and the West. The imagological analysis provides grounds for concluding that the novel is not about the distinction between the Self and the Other, but about a world that protagonists can no longer consider either own or alien since it is both for them. In The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan considers problems that reveal the fundamental issues of Chinese American literary and critical discourse: the role of Chinese culture within Chinese American identity, the Self versus the Other, the national and the transnational. The author declares no conflicts of interests.