This paper discusses the notion of Otherness in contemporary American immigrant fiction by addressing issues such as ethnic diversity, transnational identities, identity quest, alienation, intergenerational relations within immigrant families, the linguistic, cultural, and social obstacles to assimilation, and the psychological and spiritual impact of dislocation. Employing William Boelhower’s model for interpreting American immigrant literature, developed in his study “The Immigrant Novel as Genre,” and Josip Novakovich and Robert Shapard’s concepts of the “stepmother tongue” and “stepmother-tongue stories,” the paper provides an introduction to American immigrant genre and one of its main concerns – the dynamics of identity and Otherness. The analysis focuses on three American immigrant texts – Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club (1989) and two short stories from the collection Stories in the Stepmother Tongue (2000), “The Winter Hibiscus” by Minfong Ho and “Happiness” by Bharati Mukherjee. It attempts to show that in all three texts, storytelling functions as a powerful narrative strategy that both reveals and resolves the characters’ state of in-betweenness and issues such as identity struggle, cultural and generational gap, (mis)communication, and cultural translation. Whereas The Joy Luck Club introduces the culturally specific narrative technique of the “talk story,” Ho and Mukherjee employ traditional third-person and first-person narrative style, respectively. Nevertheless, in all three texts, storytelling has a crucial role that enables the characters to discover, reclaim, and redefine their identities by voicing their hidden secrets and fears, bridging language barriers, reconstructing their histories and personal life stories, passing on their cultural heritage, and ultimately, celebrating their multiculturalism. By emphasizing the importance of the authors’ personal experiences and life stories in interpreting these texts, the paper also argues that American immigrant fiction is strongly related to the genre of autobiography.