Haunted by Cultural Memory: Analysing Spectral Presence in Select Novels of Amy Tan

This article depicts how Tan, following several writers of contemporary American literature, widely uses recollected cultural memories to construct ethnic ghost narratives in her novels that address the predicaments of Chinese immigrants in the US. In her novels, Tan reconstitutes cultural memories as cultural hauntings representing immigrants’ loss of identity and the repressed trauma of relocating to a new territory. Further, the notion of a matrilineal continuum in Tan’s fiction is intrinsically related to her fictional representation of cultural hauntings. Focusing on Tan’s use of ghost narratives in her novels The Joy Luck Club, The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter’s Daughter as a supernatural terrain constituted partly through collective cultural history and partly through personal memories of ancestors, this article demonstrates how such memories in being part of the Chinese American cultural unconscious assists Chinese immigrants to find a balance between their heritage and American lifestyles.