This is the most comprehensive study to date of 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, Bella Adams 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". She emphasizes Tan's American narrators' process of becoming Chinese and discovering "real China", and the significance of the ironic staging of these moments.