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Cultural translation and the exorcist: a reading of Kingston's and Tan's ghost stories
MELUS, Summer, 2004 by Ken-fang Lee
Amy Tan's third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses and her next work, The Bonesetter's Daughter, also weave mysterious ghost stories with women's life experiences. In both novels, ghosts represent the haunting past and the cultural memory of the immigrant sisters and mothers, waiting to be remembered and then exorcised. The Hundred Secret Senses starts with the claim that "My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes" (3), (8) a key sentence of this novel. The narrator, Olivia, is half Chinese and half Caucasian. Kwan, her half sister from China, talks about ghosts all the time, especially the story of the loyal maid, the warlord, and the unfortunate lovers, Miss Banner and half-breed Johnson. According to the narrator, Olivia, Kwan thinks Olivia is actually a reincarnation of Miss Nelly Banner, Simon (Olivia's husband) Half-breed Johnson, and of course, Kwan the loyal companion to Miss Banner, Miss Moo. The setting of their previous lives is in a small village near the city Guilin in southwestern China around 1860 where political and social upheavals lead to the tragic ending of Miss Banner and Johnson's relationship. Throughout the narrative, Kwan and her "yin people" provide Olivia with advice and support in life. Kwan particularly feels responsible for Olivia and Simon's marriage, which, in her mind, is the fulfillment of the tragic love between Miss Banner and Johnson.
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In these narratives across different times and places, the reader seems to be both traveling through the tunnel of time and having an exotic experience in a foreign land. Do the ghosts really exist? Or are they just Kwan's imagination? Since arriving in America, she has confronted a different culture and a different language. She might have just made up the ghost stories to find a connection with her new family and new environment. The family she lives with is her late father's American wife, her new husband, and three half siblings whom she has never met before. For Kwan, the ghosts are both the haunting past and the linkage to who she is, and cannot be left behind. Like the narrator in The Woman Warrior, Kwan also needs to imagine the "I" and locate her "here" to constitute her own identity on new American soil.
I would argue that the haunting past and the ghosts from the previous life in Kwan's narrative symbolize cultural memory that a migrant cannot forget or eradicate. It is worth noting that Tan chooses a particular moment in Chinese history to set up the tragic romance between Miss Banner and Johnson in which Miss Moo is the go-between. In the mid-nineteenth century, China suffered from social upheavals, unstable government, and the military threat posed by Western imperialists. People were so poor that when the news about striking gold on the Golden Mountain reached the southern provinces in China, many men decided to leave their families and find their fortunes in a foreign land. This was the first wave of Chinese immigration to America. In turn, many missionaries came to China to convert the Chinese to Christianity as part of colonization. (9) Kwan's previous life story takes place against the backdrop of the Taiping Revolution Movement. Gwangxi is where the revolution broke out and it later became the main stronghold of the Taipings. As part of a complicated cultural exchange between the Chinese and the West, the Taiping Revolution Movement was even supported by some westerners to fight against the Ching Dynasty. The Taipings' Heavenly King was considered a brother of Jesus who had come to lead the revolution against the oppression of the Manchu regime.
