"When political barriers began to fall in the 1970's, older emigrants welcomed the chance to end their long and agonizing exiles. But their sons and daughters looked with a deep ambivalence on the idea of having to awaken a dormant Chinese side in themselves. And so, as the exterior world went about recognizing China, re-establishing diplomatic relations and initiating trade and cultural exchanges, these young Chinese-Americans found themselves wrestling with a very different and infinitely more complicated interior problem: how to recognize a country to which they were inextricably bound by heritage, but to which they had never been. It is out of this experience of being caught between countries and cultures that writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and now Amy Tan have begun to create what is, in effect, a new genre of American fiction."