Storytelling in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter: belonging and the transnationality of home in older age

ABSTRACT

Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter is a fictional account of a Chinese American woman and her mother, a first-generation migrant, who is negotiating dementia in later life. Analysis of diasporic novels can provide insight into migrant belonging, especially the emotional geographies of home and emotional subjectivities of ageing that are not commonly or easily elucidated even by qualitative interviewing methods. This article examines Tan’s construction of ageing as an intergenerational, cultural and emotional process, and highlights the role of storytelling as an everyday home-making practice through which the transnationality of home in older age becomes evident.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• home
• ageing
• emotion
• fiction
• Asian American diaspora

Acknowledgements

I am thankful for an ESRC Masters Research Training Studentship [K42200013141] that enabled me the creative space and inspiration to first examine this novel in 2001 and for the feedback I received from David Gilbert, Philip Crang, and Susan Smith on the dissertation I produced as a result. The later development of this article has benefited from conversations on transnational ageing with Lena Näre and others initiated at an ESF-funded workshop we co-organised in Helsinki in 2012.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

I am thankful for an ESRC Masters Research Training Studentship [K42200013141].