Two of a kind: sibling rivalry in amy tan’sthe hundred secret senses

Amy Tan’s third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses revolves around the lives of two half-sisters fated to be born and live apart in two different nations divided by a range of cultural dissimilarities. They happen to come together and coexist in the same family in a sudden turn of events. This paper is an attempt to analyze their relationship from the de-identification and birth order perspectives. The whole story is a package of episodes that display an intimacy existing between these siblings, their cultural variations notwithstanding. So, the relationship between the two siblings offers enough scope for such an analysis. The various incidents they both pass through mirror the real life happenings in many Asian-American families today. It spreads out a base for future studies of sibling relationship that are brought up in places that are distinctly diverse in intellectual, emotional and cultural environments.