12 Ghostly China: Amy Tan’s Narrative of Transnational Haunting in The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning

In The Hundred Secret Senses (Tan 1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (Tan 2001), and Saving Fish from Drowning (Tan 2005), Amy Tan continues to concentrate on the conflicts and final reconciliation between mothers and daughters as she repeatedly invokes Chinese history and landscape to contextualize her portrayal of Chinese American experiences. China, in these texts, becomes a phantom space haunted by family secrets and ghostly pasts and serves to set off the protagonists' American presents. This chapter delves into Tan's deployment of what she call narrative of transnational haunting in the three novelistic texts in order to discuss her technologies of representing China and Chinese American ethnicity. Tan's usual practice of representing and negotiating with Chinese American ethnicity is to work it through familial terms. Tan consistently writes about the love and antagonism between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters in all of her five published novels. Keywords: Amy Tan; modern China; Saving Fish from Drowning ; The Bonesetter's Daughter ; The Hundred Secret Senses