Autofiction and Therapy: Encounters of Generations and Cultures and the Journey to Self-Discovery in Amy Tan’s Fiction

Abstract

Amy Tan is one of the most significant contemporary Chinese American authors, whose personal life, full of family traumas, has been openly discussed by the author herself in various forums. Her first significant novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), was her first fictional attempt in self-definition via exploring and investigating mother–daughter conflicts, ethnic heritage, and the successes and failures in accepting otherness. Tan’s novels, especially The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) and later The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), are concrete examples of the author’s continuing desire to explore deeply rooted personal tragedies through storytelling by relocating them from the private sphere to the more public world of fiction. The paper focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on the sixteen interconnected stories included in The Joy Luck Club. It examines the encounters of literature and psychology and the link between autofiction and therapeutic writing. The daughters in the novel are constantly re-examining and redefining their American Chinese identities and trying to overcome traumas resulting from hidden or unprocessed family history, the gap between their cultural position and their mothers’. Tan’s voice and self-representation in the narrative are investigated, notions of self-reflectiveness and the phenomenon of destabilized and fluid identities are highlighted. Special attention is paid to the role of memory, personal healing, the conflicting worldviews of first-generation Asian immigrants and their American-born daughters, experiences of cultural dislocation, childhood memories of abandonment and alienation, and their roles in the formation of personal identity in the context of Tan’s autofiction.