Moving Forward to Reach the Past: The Dialogics of Time in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

History and myth coexist in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, but they do not coexist easily. The novel forges connections between two generations of women, traces four family genealogies that span the twentieth century, and stresses the importance of ethnic heritage, suggesting a heavy investment in history and historical representation. Yet the family histories depicted in the novel are profoundly mythical-the tales of the mothers' youth are timeless fables filled with supernatural wonders, presenting a China that seems drawn as much from occidental cliche as from authentic history. Even events as clearly historical as the Communist revolution become transmuted into heavily allegorical parables such as An-mei Hsu's tale of angry peasants rising up against tyrannical magpies (Tan 272-73).1 This fusion of historicity and mythic fabrication is all the more unusual because Tan assigns radically separate cultural and temporal valences to each: the techniques of myth are unilaterally reserved to represent China and the past, while America is narrated with a historical specificity which, for Tan, connotes modernity and the present. Indeed, the split is so extreme that Tan creates two entirely different scripts of cultural identity, a realistically-outlined American identity for the daughters and an Orientalized Chinese one for their mothers. With such a drastic cultural and