Contested Spaces in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior And China Men and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
Contested Spaces in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior And China Men and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Summary/Abstract: Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan contrast the authority of institutionalized history with various stories of immigrants which serve as a counter-memory negating the vision of monolithic and unchangeable history and replacing it by plurality and temporality of experience. This method of intricate design of the past points to the basic feature of historiography: imaginative reconstruction of the process of examination and analysis of the historical records. This process of contestation takes place in sharply juxtaposed spaces of China and the United States which reflect the dual position of Maxine Hong Kingston’s and Amy Tan’s characters as Asian Americans. In the novels of both authors, China is much more than a physical space, it is as a construction the first generation immigrants create to blunt the pain of nostalgia that never ceases to gnaw on them. For the second generation of Asian Americans, China becomes an idealized space to which they return searching for their roots. Equally importantly, the authors reveal blank spaces in the institutionalized histories of China and the United States by giving voices to various Others in both cultures.

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