魅影中國：譚恩美的《百種神秘感覺》；《接骨師的女兒》與《防魚溺水》中的跨國詭魅敘事

Ghostly China: Amy Tan’s Narrative of Transnational Uncanny in The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning

從《喜福會》(The Joy Luck Club 1989) 一炮而紅開始，華裔美國女作家譚恩美 (Amy Tan) 的每部小說都獲得大量讀者的青睞。推究譚氏受歡迎的原因，除了書寫議題符合女性主義的部份訴求，極重要的因素是歐美主流社會讀者希望從她的作品中一窺中國與華裔生活。譚恩美的小說所處理的主題不外乎母女之間的世代衝突、保存母親記憶與延續母系傳承的急迫性、以及女兒自身族裔認同與事業前途的掙扎。綜觀其敘事模式，其文本經常藉由母女兩代關係帶出持續與美國場景並行的中國故事，母親（中國）創傷的過去與女兒（美國？／中國？）迷惘的現在持續辯證，不斷呈現母親的文化記憶，也逼迫女兒修正自己的華裔美國身分認同。筆者認為譚恩美不斷以一種「跨國詭魅」(transnational uncanny) 的敘事間接記憶／再現中國，這是譚氏書寫最能吸引讀者之處，甚且可以說魅影式的中國敘事是其文本魅力之根源。她近十年的三部小說《百種神秘感覺》(A HundredSecret Senses 1995)、《接骨師的女兒》(The Bonesetter’s Daughter 2001) 與《防魚溺水》(Saving Fish from Drowning 2005) 中，不但中國敘事的份量日益加重，而且屬於「中國迷信」的主題諸如陰陽眼、轉世與靈媒等等的題材都紛紛出籠，甚至直接由鬼魂作為主要的敘事聲音。本文即欲探討譚恩美在這三部近期小說文本，如何以跨國詭魅的敘事再現與建構想像中的中國文化記憶。論文將以簡短的文獻回顧推演出跨國詭魅敘事的定義，其後再逐步分析譚恩美的這三部小說如何想像與記憶中國。

Upon the publication of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), Amy Tan became an instant star in the publishing world; and her second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), was also a triumph. Tan's skillful renditions of mother-daughter relationships reach the hearts of millions of readers. Moreover, her work—which comes more than a dozen years after Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976)—has helped create a renaissance of Chinese American writing. Despite the fact that Tan refuses to be pegged a mother-daughter expert, yet both The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife center around the love and antagonism between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters. In The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), Tan continues to concentrate on the conflicts and final reconciliation between mother and daughter figures as she again and again invokes Chinese history and landscape to contextualize her portrayal of Chinese American experiences. China, in these texts, becomes a phantom space haunted by family secrets and ghostly past and serves to set off the protagonists' American present. In this paper I delve into Tan's deployment of what I call 'narrative of transnational uncanny' in the three novelistic texts to discuss her technologies of representing China and Chinese American ethnicity.