I won't be what I'm not": Polyphony of Cultures in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Abstract

The Joy Luck Club is one of Amy Tan’s most successful novels. Tan builds up her reputation as a notable writer by the same novel. So, studies on Tan's The Joy Luck Club have been for the most part composed on broad subjects such as women’s rights, postcolonial, and diaspora. Be that as it may, few studies tackled the polyphonic structure of the novel. Viewed through the lens of Michael Bakhtin's theory of polyphony, the present paper, therefore, considers how different voices, as a polyphonic structure, in Tan's The Joy Luck Club may appear problematic because those various voices seem to be conflicting and thus sound like a cacophony. Moreover, this process of conflicting voices does not necessarily improve the hybrid position of culture but may lead to further marginalization. The study focuses on the negative emotional responses of double cultural dialectic voices on the bifocal writer - Amy Tan. The study concluded that those conflicting cultural voices distort the opportunity of those bifocal women writers to form their bicultural identity as second generations of immigrant women. Moreover, the voices hinder women from reflecting generational and intercultural differences among Chinese-American families that those bifocal writers find themselves in due to living in two different cultures.