Published Paper Details:

Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning (2005) employs spectral narration as a mediating instrument of culture by use of ghostly voice of Bibi Chen, a late Chinese American art dealer who takes readers through the lapses of a group of tourists in Burma. Tan, through the spectral viewpoint of Bibi, integrates and criticizes Chinese American diasporic sensibilities, Burmese landscapes of culture and Western views of its Asian perception. This paper is based on spectral theory (Gordon, 1997), postcolonial theory (Bhabha, 1994), and diaspora theory (Brah, 1996; Gilroy, 1993) to explore how the liminal state that Bibi experiences between the world of life and death is reflected in cultural and existential displacement. Her unreliable and ironic narration shatters East-West binaries and shows us that the exchange between cultures is flowing. The essay compares Saving Fish from Drowning to other recent works like Kingston the Woman Warrior, Morrison Beloved, and Rushdie Midnight Children to claim that Tan is rebranding the Asian American literary genre through the ghost narrator as a tool of cultural translation and moral thought and protest against erasing the historical record of the Chinese.