This volume is a comprehensive study of author Amy Tan's work, offering close readings of her texts in the context of broader debates about the representation of identity, history and reality. In contrast with Tan's own American-born narrator, and mainstream critics, this work looks beyond the stereotypes which appear in Tan's books, and explores the ways in which Chinese immigrants and their American relatives struggle to understand each other's "best qualities" via the Chinese tradition of the "talk story". The author emphasizes Tan's American narrators' process of becoming Chinese and discovering "real China", and the significance of the ironic staging of these moments.