She also notes the political allegory of equating Chinese patriarchy with Japanese expansionism and imperialism as a rhetorical device meant to be palatable to the Western feminist reader. Davis reads The Kitchen God's Wife as a form of the traditional American Dream. He highlights Winnie's will to live, determination, and transformation into an American as support for this reading. This idea seems to contradict Xu's reading of The Joy Luck Club's ending as affirmation of the healing powers of the Chinese identity. Reid, E. Shelley.
Identity is seen as multivocal, and multifaceted.
Xu examines the connection between memory, narration, existential repeatability, and ethnic identity. Memory, for Xu, functions in narrative form. Matrilineage in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club . Psychoanalytic and socio-historic in nature, citing Marianne Hirsch and Chodorow. Identity is problematized, allowing the reader more active engagement of the text.