In this article, I would like to examine a popular Chinese American woman writer, Amy Tan, to investigate the fine line between selling the postcolonial exotic and foregrounding cultural difference in English. There is no denying that she has won canonized status in publishing houses and the academy. Being a multilingual, she willingly or unwillingly applies translation in her works. To read their works in the contexts of cultural translation, I emphasize that Tan negotiates and translates cultural differences into identity formation and to various extent foregrounds the process of hybridisation. I follow Graham Huggan's classification between 'postcoloniality' and 'postcolonialism' and argue that Tan treads a thin line between a postcolonial translator, which prompts the concept of 'postcolonialism' and a cultural tour guide, which more accords with the concept of 'postcoloniality' According to Huggan, 'postcoloniality's regime of value is implicitly assimilative and market-driven', yet postcolonialism 'implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification' (2001: 6). What I mean by a postcolonial translator is someone who is sensitive to unequal development of languages and cultures, challenges the hegemony of the dominant, one-dimensional canonical literary values. By contrast, a cultural tour guide is a writer who self-orientalizes his/her own ethnicity, to sell out exotic flavours to the mainstream readership. I suggest that Tan's work takes the issue of ambiguity in cultural translation on board but does not further question western terms. Acknowledging how power relations influence our understanding of cultures and how ambiguity is crucial to the hybrid aesthetics of postcolonial writing, Tan provides in her writing a site of cultural translation that engages with the issue of cultural difference. Above all, markers of cultural differences in postcolonial writing should be respected, not dismissed.