Chinese and American Cultures Chinese-American authors Amy Tan and Gish Jen both grapple with the idea of ​​mixed identity in America. For them, a generational problem develops over time and cultural shift occurs as family lines expand. While this is not the problem in and of itself—indeed, it is natural for current culture to gain a foothold on distant cultures—it serves as a backdrop for the disorientation that occurs between generations. In their novels, Tan and Jen locate the cause of this imbalance in the active dismissal of Chinese mothers by their Chinese-American children. In The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan draws attention to the idea of ​​unfulfillment and forgetfulness. Through these two factors, Tan attempts to explain the displacement from the past of both mothers and daughters. We discover that the daughters are lost and wandering, and the mothers themselves seem paralyzed by a secret past of pain and sacrifice. For them, the past is a tenuous and ghostly thing that is not digested for some time. For many of them it is never talked about. Suyuan Woo's death is attributed to this: “'He had a new idea in his head,' my father said. “But before it could leave his mouth, the thought got too big and exploded. It must have been a terrible idea." "The doctor said she died of a brain aneurysm. And her friends at the Joy Luck Club said she died just like a rabbit: quickly and with unfinished business left behind" (Tan 19). Suyuan had a secret that she had kept from her daughter Jing-Mei all her life. life: two sisters who had been left behind while fleeing China While it can't be said that this is what gave her an aneurysm, the symbolism of having unfinished business and... half of the paper... hers. nephew who eats the Chinese part. Addie in “Just Wait” is withdrawn from her entire family because she simply doesn't fit in and is placed, with a feeble struggle, in the same category as her sick brother Duncan in “Duncan in China.” to accept the China he visits because he has only images of the royal past in his head. Both the novel and the collection of short stories reflect the fear of an unexplored and left-behind past they desperately search for the ignored and excluded past. Works Cited: Jen, Gish. Who is Irish? New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1999.Tan, Amy. The Joy and Luck Club. New York: The Sons of G. P. Putnam, 1989.Xu, Ben. “Memory and the ethnic self; Reading Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club" in Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures. 261-77.