UCLA Library

An Asian American bestseller and a required reading in many classrooms, The Joy Luck Clubby Chinese American author Amy Tan has prompted substantial debate—some zealously laudatory of its rich narratives and cultural insights, some seethingly critical of its Orientalist motives, some neutrally analytical of its cultural symbols—over its representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans in the literary mainstream. Unfortunately, few scholars have considered detaching representational power from ethnic texts and alleviating the burden on ethnic writers to represent their communities. This thesis uses cultural criticism and reception theory to examine three things: the novel’s cultural and linguistic inaccuracies, the role of shame in forming the Chinese American identity, and the cumulative influences of popular reviews, educational guides, and public commentary on readers’ tendencies to attach representational value to the novel. I find that the novel functions as a subjective (fictional) Chinese American experience more so than an all-encompassing Chinese cultural and linguistic lesson; there ispotential for Chinese Americans to transcend the “Chinese” and “American” binary and exist with nuance and without dual alienation; it is the novel’s reception, notTan herself, that has constructed its representational power. These findings suggest that the experiences and identities of American ethnic minorities are multifaceted and nuanced, and therefore incapable of being comprehensively represented and dichotomously regarded. To prevent absolute dependence on media for developing multicultural awareness, readers must consume critically and introspectively, maintaining the awareness of our reader subjectivity and of the limits of literature—especially fictional literature. 

The internet has given large corporations huge platforms to spread misinformation in their advertising. Due to the statute of limitations defense, government agencies are unable to effectively discourage this misinformation by themselves. Companies using the defense are more protected from government-led lawsuits the longer they get away with spreading false information, giving them little reason to stop making those misrepresentations. Traditionally, for situations when the statute of limitations defense has produced seemingly inequitable results, courts have developed exceptions to the usual rules of the defense. However, none of the exceptions permit the government to discourage consumer fraud without dismantling the statute of limitations defense. This article argues that because of the statute of limitations defense, government agencies alone are unable to stop misinformation in advertising. Therefore, they should focus their broad investigative powers on exposing the fraud and stopping it with injunctive relief. Once the fraud is exposed, plaintiffs in the private market can seek their own relief. Their lawsuits face much lessrestrictive statute of limitations rules than government-led lawsuits. Corporations will be discouraged from committing fraud because they know that, even if they are successful for a long time, they will remain vulnerable to private plaintiffs. This joint action by the government and the private market will discourage misinformation in advertising without doing undue damage to the statute of limitations defense.