身為華裔美籍作家，譚艾美寫過不少國際知名的小說，用以探究華人母女關係。其中有一九八九年的《喜福會》、一九九一年的《灶神娘娘》與一九九五年的《百種神秘感覺》，在這三本小說中運用了大量的中國神話、傳奇、迷信、成語、與音譯中國方言。譚艾美使用許多中國語言和文化背景並且同時透過書中母女對話，讓西方讀者深入瞭解東西方文化上之差異。本論文旨在運用霍米巴巴的後殖民「文化翻譯」理論與德勒茲的「次要文學」理論來重新檢驗這種中國性為「他者」之再現為何會引發世人的關注？另一方面，本文也將探討作家譚艾美書中應用中國性的適當性與目的，意即：她是否能解開西方社會對東方的文化幻想之誤會，並且傳達真正的中國文化？亦或，她事實上創造出一種不同於西方主流文學的新興文學或次要文學？

An American writer of Chinese descent, Amy Tan, has written quite a few internationally popular novels exploring Chinese mother-daughter relationships, including The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995). In these three novels, Tan uses a variety of Chinese myths, legends, superstitions, characters, idioms, phrases, sayings and expressions. Moreover, she uses a lot of Chinese language and cultural background in her writing, and, at the same time, translates them into English through those Chinese mothers’ words to their American daughters in order to familiarize both the daughters and the readers with the cultural differences between China and America. In this paper, my approach is to adopt Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of “cultural translation” and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of “minor literature” to re-examine why such a representation of Chineseness as an Other arouses such fascination of many readers around the world. Furthermore, I intend to investigate the purposes of Tan’s appropriation and manipulation of Chinese elements, Chinese cultural heritage in her novels to highlight the following issues: Is it possible that she tries to clear up the misunderstanding of Oriental fantasy and introduce the real Chinese culture to the western society? Or can it be that she actually creates a new form of Chinese-American or Asian-American literature which combines the two different cultures as one?

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