ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship on the contemporary linked story collection has regarded the form as a vehicle for ethnic American fiction that dramatizes the relationship between individuals and their cultural communities. This chapter investigates how the truncated stories by Amy Tan in Seventeen and Ladies Home Journal, later included in full in The Joy Luck Club (1989), simplify and conventionalize the dynamics between immigrant mothers and their daughters, making them legible to mass audiences. The book as a whole gives the mothers a voice, alternating between their broken English and fluent oral storytelling that describes their upbringing. However, their “Chinese fairy tales” often invent cultural traditions and resemble Eastern myth, which can enthrall readers but also reinforce stereotypes of Asian Americans.
