Representation and Contextualization: A Comparative Study of The Joy Luck Club and Typical American

ABSTRACT Besides Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Gish Jen came to the literary scene with their debut novels The Joy Luck Club and Typical American. Since the 1970s, the “Chin-Kingston debate” on “the real and the fake” representation of Chinese has aroused heated discussion among scholars and Chinese American writers. This article aims at pinpointing the similarities and differences between both writers in their literary representation of Chinese and “Chinese America” in the contemporary American literature. Besides the shared writing techniques between the two writers, they differ greatly in their dealing with the gender knots, Chinese American experience in the U.S. and their respective attitudes that lurking behind their words. Hence, in the light of this perspective, we can better grasp the “typical American” writing strategy of Gish Jen and the typical recourse to Chinese elements in the “Joy Luck Club” stories by Amy Tan, which will shed light on later Chinese American writing.