Error loading page. Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading. Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help. Digital Downloads Collaboration. Search Search Search Browse menu. Sign in. Live Chat. Recent updates. The Kitchen God's Wife. Description Details Reviews With the same narrative skills and evocative powers that made her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, a national bestseller, Tan now tells the story of Winnie Louie, an aging Chinese woman unfolding a life's worth of secrets to her suspicious, Americanized daughter.
Languages English. My mother didn't exactly ask me to help, but she did say in a terse voice that Auntie Helen was leaving the shop early to get ready for the big dinner— in spite of the fact there was so much to do at the shop and Grand Auntie's funeral service was the very next day. And then she reminded me that Grand Auntie was always very proud of me—in our family "proud" is as close as we get to saying "love. And then she counts on her fingers: "And koala bears and a spiny anteater and a humpback whale.
I sometimes worry she will become too passive in the shadow of her confident big sister. She looks at her feet, searching for an answer. As I turn down Ross Alley, everything around me immediately becomes muted in tone.
It is no longer the glaring afternoon sun and noisy Chinatown sidewalks filled with people doing their Saturday grocery shopping. The alley sounds are softer, quickly absorbed, and the light is hazy, almost greenish in cast. On the right-hand side of the street is the same old barbershop, run by Al Fook, who I notice still uses electric clippers to shear his customers' sideburns. Across the street are the same trade and family associations, including a place that will send ancestor me morials back to China for a fee.
And farther down the street is the shopfront of a fortuneteller. A hand written sign taped to the window claims to have "the best lucky numbers, the best fortune advice," but the sign taped to the door says: "Out of Business.
She stares at me with a somber expression. I wave, but she does not wave back. She looks at me as if I don't belong here, which is how I feel. It contains shelves full of good-luck charms and porcelain and wooden statues of lucky gods, hundreds of them. I've called this place the Shop of the Gods ever since I can remember.
It also sells the kind of stuff people get for Buddhist funerals—spirit money, paper jewelry, incense, and the like. Hong, the owner, waving me to come in. When I first met him, I thought his name was Sam Fook, like the shop. I found out later that sam fook means "triple blessing" in old Cantonese, and according to my mother—or rather, her Hong Kong customers—sam fook sounds like a joke, like saying "the Three Stooges. But he says he has too much business already. Hong says when I walk in the door, "I got some things for your mother here, for the funeral tomorrow.
You take it to her, okay? I guess this means Grand Auntie's funeral will be. Although she attended the First Chinese Baptist Church for a number of years, both she and my mother stopped going right after my father died.
In any case, I don't think Grand Auntie ever gave up her other beliefs, which weren't exactly Buddhist, just the superstitious rituals concerning attracting good and avoiding bad. On those occasions when I did go up to her apartment, I used to play with her altar, miniature red temple containing a framed picture of Chinese god. In front of that was an imitation-brass filled with burnt incense sticks, and on the side were offerings of oranges, Lucky Strike cigarettes, and an airline mini-bottle of Johnnie Walker Red whiskey.
It was like a Chinese version of a Christmas creche. And now I come to the flower shop itself. It is the bottom floor of a three-story brick building. The shop is about the size of a one-car garage and looks both sad and familiar. The front has a chipped red-bordered door covered with rusted burglarproof mesh. But it's easy to miss, because the place sits back slightly and always looks dark and closed, as it does today.
So the location my mother and Auntie Helen picked isn't exactly bustling. Yet they seem to have done all right. In a way, it's remarkable. After all these years, they've done almost nothing to keep up with the times or make the place more attractive.
I open the door and bells jangle. I'm instantly engulfed in the pungent smell of gardenias, a scent I've always associated with funeral parlors. The place is dimly lit, with only one fluorescent tube hanging over the cash register—and that's where my mother is, standing on a small footstool so she can see out over the counter, with dime-store reading glasses perched on her nose. She is talking on the telephone in rapid Chinese and waves impatiently for me to come in and wait.
Her hair is pulled straight back into a bun, not a strand ever out of place. The bun today has been made to look thicker with the addition of a false swatch of hair a "horse's tail," she calls it, for wearing only on important occasions. Actually, now I can tell—by the shrillness of her pitch and the predominance of negative "vuh-vuh-vuh" sounds—that she's arguing in Shanghainese, and not just plain Mandarin.
This is serious. Most likely it's with a neighborhood supplier, to judge from the way she's punching in numbers on a portable calculator, then reading aloud the printed results in harsh tones, as if they were penal codes.
She pushes the "No Sale" button on the cash register, and when the drawer pops forward, she pulls out a folded receipt, snaps it open with a jerk of her wrist, then reads numbers from that as well. The cash register is used to store only odds and ends, or what my mother calls "ends and odds and evens. When my mother and Auntie Helen first bought the store and its fixtures, they found out soon enough that anytime the sales transaction added up to anything with a 9 in it, the whole register froze up.
But they decided to keep the cash register anyway, "for stick-'em-up," is how my mother explained it to me. If they were ever robbed, which has yrt to happen, the robber would get only four dollars amid a pile of pennies, all the money that is kept in the till. The real money is stashed underneath the counter, in a teapot with a spout that's been twice broken and glued back on. And the kettle sits on a hot plate that's missing a plug.
I guess the idea is that no one would ever rob the store for a cup of cold tea. I once told my mother and Auntie Helen that a robber would never believe that the shop had only four dollars to its name. I thought they should put at least twenty in the cash register to make the ruse seem more possible. But my mother thought twenty dollars was much to give a robber.
And Auntie Helen said she would "worry sick" about losing that much money— and what good would the trick be then? At the time, I considered giving them the twenty dollars myself to prove my point. But then I thought, what's the point? And as I look around the shop now, I realize maybe they were right. Who would ever consider robbing this place for more than a getaway bus fare? No, this place is burglarproof just the way it is.
The shop has the same dull gray concrete floor of twentyfive years ago, now polished shiny with wear. The counter is covered with the same contact paper, green-and-white bamboo lattice on the sides and wood grain on the top. Even the phone my mother is using is the same old black model with a rotary dial and a fabric cord that doesn't coil or stretch. And over the years, the lime-colored walls have become faded and splotched, then cracked from the '89 earthquake. So now the place has the look of spidery decay and leaf mold.
She seems to have reached some sort of agreement with the supplier. Finally she bangs the phone down. Although we have not seen each other since Christmas, almost a month ago, we do none of the casual hugs and kisses Phil and I exchange when we see his parents and friends. Instead, my mother walks out from around the counter, muttering, "Can you imagine? That man is cheating me! Tried to charge me for extra-rush delivery.
I never cease to be amazed by the amount of emotional turmoil my mother will go through for a few dollars. It's only three dollars—" "I'm not concerned about money! This is not right. Last month, he tried to add another kind of extra charge too. Do any of you speak English? My mother's face instantly cheers, and she nods, waving them in. Don't speak English. Why should I send her any good business? You look, only this morning I had to make all these myself. There are no modern arrangements of bent twigs or baskets of exotica with Latinate-drooping mimes.
My mother opens the glass door to a refrigerator unit that once housed bottles of soda pop and beer. No doubt we'll have to wear some of these tonight. The second shelf is chock-full of milk-glass vases, each containing only a single rosebud, a fern frond, and a meager sprinkling of baby's breath. This is the type of floral arrangement you give to hospital patients who go in for exploratory surgery, when you don't know yet whether the person will be there for very long.
My father received a lot of those when he first went into the hospital and later right before he died. Some for a retirement dinner," my mother explains, and perhaps because I don't look sufficiently impressed, she adds, "For assistant manager at Wells Fargo.
Lining the walls are large funeral wreaths, propped on easels. I've always found wreaths hideously sad, like decorative lifesavers thrown out too late. And now she steers me toward her real pride and joy. At the front of the shop, the only place that gets filtered daylight for a few hours a day, are her "long-lasting bargains," as she calls them-—philodendrons, rubber plants, chicken-feet bushes, and miniature tangerine trees. These are festooned with red banners, congratulating this business or that for its new store opening.
My mother has always been very proud of those red banners. By success, I suppose she means that the same people over the last twenty-five years keep coming back. Only now it's less and less for shy brides and giddy grooms, and more and more lor the sick, the old, and the dead.
She smiles mischievously, then tugs my elbow. She opens the door to the back of the shop. It's dark as a vault inside and I can't make out anything except the dense odor of funeral flowers. My mother is groping for the piece of string that snaps on the light. Finally the room is lit by the glare of a naked bulb that swings back and forth on the cord suspended from the high ceiling.
And what I now see is horrifyingly beautiful—row after row of gleaming wreaths, white gardenias and yellow chrysanthemums, red Imiers hanging down from their easels, looking like beautifully dressed heavenly attendants. I am stunned by how much hard work this represents. I imagine my mother's small hands with their hmentlike skin, furiously pulling out stray leaves, and sharp ends of wire, inserting each flower in its proper place. It looks the same as the others.
I wrote the wishes myself. Her finger moves slowly down the red banner, as she reads in a formal Chinese I can't understand. And then she translates: "Farewell, Grand Auntie, heaven is lucky. From your favorite niece, Pearl Louie Brandt, and husband. Hong said to give you this. Inside are a dozen or so bundles of spirit money, money Grand Auntie can supposedly use to bribe her way along to Chinese heaven. She was a good lady. There you are," It's my cousin Mary.
I haven't seen her in the two years since she and Doug moved to Los Angeles. We wait for Mary to move her way through the banquet crowd. She rushes toward us and gives me a kiss, then rubs my cheek and laughs over the extra blush she's added. Just sensational. She's wearing heavy makeup and false eyelashes, and her hair is a confusing mass of curls and mousse.
A silver-fox stole keeps slipping off her shoulders. As she pushes it up for the third time, she laughs and says, "Doug gave me this old thing for Christmas, what a bother. But that's Mary, the oldest child of the two families, so it's always seemed important to her to look the most successful.
Jennifer has grown plump, while her eyes, lined in hlack, look small and hard. The top part of her hair is teased up in pointy spikes, with the rest falling limply rummy, tastes like McDonald hamburgers. Take it, you like. My mother's mouth is shut tight. She looks away. And I feel so bad for her, that she's been betrayed by her memory and my childhood fondness for rubbery-tasting things. I think about a child's capacity to hurt her mother in ways she cannot ever imagine. The evening turns out to be much worse than I expected.
Throughout the dinner I watch my mother and Auntie Helen getting on each other's nerves. They argue in Chinese over whether the pork is too salty, whether the chicken is overcooked, whether the Happy Family dish used too many water chestnuts to cut down on the ration of scallops. I see Phil trying to make polite conversation with my cousin Frank, who is chain-smoking, something Phil hates with a passion.
I see old family friends who are not really friends making toasts to a bride-and-groom-to-be who will surely be divorced in two years' time. I smile woodenly and listen to Mary and Doug chatting to me as if we were still the best of friends. Mostly I see my mother sitting one table away, and I feel as lonely as I imagine her to be. I think of the enormous distance that separates us and makes us unable to share the most important matters of our life.
How did this happen? And suddenly everything—the flower arrangements on the plastic-topped tables, my mother's memories of my childhood, the whole family—everything feels like a sham, and also sad and true. All these meaningless gestures, old misunderstandings, and painful secrets, why do we keep them up? I feel as if I were suffocating, and want to run away.
A hand taps my shoulder. It's Auntie Helen. I shake my head. Otherwise I have to pay the restaurant extra. In the kitchen, Auntie Helen cuts a white sheet cake into little squares and puts each piece on a paper plate. She licks whipped cream off her fingers, stuffs a falling strawberry back into its spongy center.
You know the place? I am surprised by her sudden change in tone, because I honestly don't know what she's talking about. She had fallen down her front steps on a rainy day and hit her head against the rail. And my mother, who was with her at the time, had taken her to the hospital. They took X rays: no broken bones, no concussion, not like Auntie Du, lucky for her.
Instead they found a little dark spot on her skull, did more tests. God touched his finger there and told me, Time to go. I have a brain tumor. My children, your Uncle Henry, they all said, Now you will live forever. But what do you think they are really saying?
Why does Bao-bao suddenly say he is getting married? Why does Mary say she is flying home, bringing the whole family? Let's have a reunion, she says. And Frank, he got a haircut before I had to ask twice. Today she said at the shop, Go, go, you are busy with your son's party. I can make the wreaths. Why are you shaking your head? This is true! Why so sudden? My children now respect me, why? They come to see me, why? Mary calls me Mommy again.
Your mother wants to do all the work. You know why? They know. They all know I'm dying. They won't say, but I think it must be very fast. If they say it's benign, it means it's—" She holds up her hand. I'm not scared. I'm not a young woman anymore. Almost seventy-three. They want to be nice before I die, okay.
I can pretend too that I don't know. I don't know whether Auntie Helen is really sick, or only imagining something bad out of her children's good intentions. It does 36 Amy Tan strike me as strange, though, what she said about everyone's sudden change of character. It would be jus like the Kwongs to pass around a secret and then pretend nobody knows a thing. I only want to tell you so you understand why I can no longer keep your secret. It makes my heart and shoulders heavy that your mother does not know.
How can I fly to heaven when this is weighing me down? No, you must tell your mother, Pearl. Tell her about your multiple neurosis. And now I want to shake her, tell her to stop playing this game.
You know how she is. That's why I know this is the right time to tell her. She'll only be angry that we kept it a secret. So selfish. I'm fine. Maybe she lives to be a hundred. Then what do you do, ah? I just don't want her to worry. No more problem after that. She'll think it's worse, than it is. Maybe Auntie Helen is right and she does have a brain tumor.
Maybe it's eaten away at her brain and she's gone crazy. I will. She rubs my shoulder, plucks at the fabric of my wool dress. No more talking now. Let's go back. She hesitates, ready to argue. And then, perhaps in deference to her own illness, she lets me. After the dinner, we are back at my mother's house, the girls have done their usual sequence of giggling, then arguing, then wailing, and have finally fallen asleep, I had considered asking my mother about Auntie Helen's brain tumor but decided it was not the best time to have one subject lead into another.
I'm exhausted, after declining my mother's offers of tea, instant 38 Amy Tan coffee, and orange juice, I stand up and yawn. Phil offers my mother a goodnight kiss, which she cautiously accepts with a stiff upturned cheek. And at last we have escaped to our room. He rolls his eyes at me.
It is quiet for about five seconds. Heater can be turned up. And then I say, more gently this time, "Don't worry. Go to bed. There is only silence.
And finally, I hear her slippers slowly padding down the hallway, each soft shuffle breaking my heart. And now Phil and I are going to be late for Grand Auntie's service, thanks to a spat between Tessa and Cleo that intuited in eggs over easy being flung onto Phil's only good shirt and tie. While we searched for replacements on Clement Street, Phil suggested that we shouldn't bring the girls to the funeral.
And explained to the girls it's like that time we went 4ve and Joanne's wedding— grownup time. Isn't that right, girls? My cousin Frank hands us black armbands to wear. As I put mine on, I feel somewhat guilty, this pretense of grief. I realize now that I knew almost nothing about Grand Auntie Du, except that she smelled like mothballs and was always trying to feed me old Chinese candies and sugared beef jerky, pulled out of dusty tins stored on top of her refrigerator.
Bao-bao is there to greet us as well. He's smiling broadly. You can buy more luck later with the money. Cleo waves her candy for me to unwrap. Suddenly we are blinded by the glare of a spotlight. I'm surprised to see Tessa is now walking down the aisle in the manner of a coquettish bride. I can't believe it: Uncle Henry is standing in the middle of the aisle-videotaping the funeral! Who's going to watch this later? Through the haze of the incense-blurred light, I can barely see my mother.
She's gesturing for us to come sit with her in the second row. Phil corrals the girls. As the camera continues to roll, we walk quickly down the aisle, past what must be only a dozen or so mourners—Mary, Doug, and their children, some people from the church, all Chinese.
I also see several old ladies I've never met before. They look like recent immigrants, to judge from their undyed cropped hair and old-style brown padded jackets. As we slide into our seats, Auntie Helen turns around in the front row. She squeezes my hand, and I see she has tears in her eyes.
My mother is dry-eyed. And her dinner's on fire! And then I see it too—God! In front of the casket is a long, low table overflowing with food—what looks like a nine-course Chinese dinner, as well as an odd assortment of mangoes, oranges, and a carved watermelon.
This must be Grand Auntie's farewell provisions for trudging off to heaven. The smoke of a dozen burning incense sticks overlaps and swirls up around the casket, the ethereal stairway to the next world. Phil is staring at me, waiting for an explanation. This has to be a mistake," I whisper to him, and I turn to my mother, trying to keep my voice calm. She nods. Clothes, I chose for her, all new. Casket, I also helped decide this.
Not the best wood, but almost the best. Before she is buried, we take the jewelry off, of course. How can you see her that way? She squirms down low in her seat. I squeeze her hand. It's not nice! She's dead, like Bootie the cat. I am trying to think of what I can say to comfort the girls, but—too late—they are pushing each other, crying and shouting, "Stop it!
But I feel paralyzed, helpless, not knowing what to do. Phil stands up to lead both of the girls out. I'll be back in an hour. I'll meet you out front. I'm relieved to think this may be all the damage that will remain, a ruined appetite and sticky hands. As I throw him a scowl, I notice something else: Uncle Henry still has the video camera going. After Phil and the girls leave, I try to regain my composure. I look ahead to avoid glaring at my mother or Uncle Henry. No use arguing, I tell myself.
What's done is done. In front of the pews is a large picture of Grand Auntie. It looks like a blown-up version of a passport photo taken fifty years ago. She's not exactly young, but she must have had most of her teeth back then. I look at Grand Auntie in her casket. Her mouth looks caved in, her thin face like that of a wizened bird. She is so still, yet I feel we are all waiting for something to happen, for Grand Auntie suddenly to transform and manifest herself as a ghost.
It reminds me of a time when I was five years old, that age when anything was possible if you could just imagine it. I had stared at the flickering eyes of a carved pumpkin, waiting for goblins to fly out. The longer I waited, the more convinced I became that it would happen. To this day, I can still vividly remember the laughing ghost that finally poured out of the pumpkin's mouth. My mother had come rushing into the room when I screamed.
I was babbling tearfully that I had seen a ghost. And instead of comforting me, or pooh-poohing that it was just my imagination, she had said, "Where? Of course, my father later assured me that the only ghost was the Holy Ghost, and He would never try to scare me. And then he demonstrated in a scientific Way that what I must have seen were smoky fumes created when the candle inside the pumpkin burned low and extinguished itself.
I was not comforted 44 Amy Tan by his answer, because my mother had then stared at me, as if I had betrayed her and made her look like a fool. That's how things were. She was always trying to suppress certain beliefs that did not coincide with my father's Christian ones, but sometimes they popped out anyway.
She really does make the best ones, and I think it's a pity that these are just for show. I scan the other dishes and see they have even added the cake left over from last night. Above the casket, a white banner made out of ten feet of butcher paper is stuck to the wall with masking tape.
The banner is covered with large black characters, and the whole thing ends with an exclamation point, just like political billboard slogans I once saw in magazine photos of China. This is from people with the Kwong family association. Maybe Helen gave them a donation. I search for mine, and I'm about to ask my mother where it is, when Uncle Henry turns the spotlight on again and starts filming Grand Auntie Du, lying at center stage.
He waves to someone at stage left. These sounds are joined by two voices, chanting a tune that seems to consist of the same four notes and syllables. It repeats so many times I'm sure it's a record that has become stuck. But now, emerging from the left alcove are two Buddhist monks with shaved heads, dressed in saffron-colored robes. The older, larger monk lights a long stick of incense, bows three times to the body, then places the incense in the burner and backs away, bowing again.
The younger monk is sounding the wooden clapper. Then they both begin walking down the aisle slowly, chanting, "Ami-Ami-, Amitaba, Amitaba.
The smaller monk, I can see now, is not a monk at all, but a woman, a nun with three or four small scabs on her skull. My mother looks. Flea bites, maybe," she concludes. And now the old ladies in the old-style jackets begin moaning and wailing waving their arms up and down, overcome with grief, it seems. Uncle Henry turns the camera toward them. They came early, later saw we didn't too many people to mourn Grand Auntie.
So talked to Auntie Helen, she gave them a few dollars 46 Amy Tan And now they're doing the old custom, crying out loud and acting like they don't want the dead person to leave so fast. This is how you show respect. Good living that way. Better than cleaning house. I don't know if my mother has said this to be disdainful or simply to state a matter of fact.
The wooded clapper and the bell sound again, faster and faster. Suddenly the white paper banner tears away from the wall, and the family association wishes for lucky and long life spiral down and land draped across Grand Auntie's chest like a beauty pageant banner. My mother and several of the older women jump up and cry, "Ai-ya! The monk and nun continue chanting with no change of expression.
But my mother is furious. She gets up and walks out of the room. In a few minutes, she comes back with a young Caucasian man with thinning blond hair. He is wearing a black suit, so he must be with the funeral parlor. I can tell my mother is still scolding him, as she points to the disaster-ridden banner. People are murmuring loudly throughout the room. The old ladies are still wailing and bowing stiffly; the monk and nun keep chanting.
The blond man walks quickly to the front, my mother follows. He bows three times to Grand Auntie Du, then moves her casket, which glides forward easily on wheels. After another bow, the man ceremoniously plucks the banner off Grand Auntie's chest and carries it in both arms as if it were holy vestments. More there, too. How can you let her luck fall down like that! Did he bow to show genuine respect, I wonder, or has he learned to do this only for his Chinese customers?
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years.
And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. Published September 21st by Penguin Books first published More Details Original Title. United States of America. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Kitchen God's Wife , please sign up.
In the story, Winny tells her daughter about Kitchen God. The Kitchen God is no better than human. It actually worse. You don't even want to call as a God. But he is a still God. Winny married a crazy bad man in her first marriage. It seems represents that crazy man as a God and Kitchen wife is Winny herself.
See 1 question about The Kitchen God's Wife…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Kitchen God's Wife. Amy Tan writes about women complex women! The men in her stories are shadows, almost undeveloped, with little presence except when they are cruel and threatening.
The main focus is all about women. And the women are vivid too. Winnie and Helen come alive. By the end of the book I felt I knew them… quite well. Both their personalities and voices are so strong. I can still imagine them bickering with each other. And they are friends too -- true friends, who resent and care about each other. They even talk trash, yet they still stick together. I found this push and pull so real.
You want good things for your friends, but you never want them to be too successful or too happy. LOL Another great character was Auntie Du, who is an older woman with no husband he died and no money. But she turns out to be this lovely hero, whom I just wanted to hug.
What a great character! Tan takes you a different world and a different culture, but makes it familiar simply by introducing you to these fascinating and flawed women.
Problems I had with this book were the slow parts. I really hated him, which is good for a villain. I think Tan revealed way too much of the ending in the beginning when Pearl is telling her story. Having Winnie go back and explain how things led up to where she was in the present, when you already know the outcome, kills a lot of the suspense. But all in all, I enjoyed this a lot.
View all 16 comments. Apr 11, Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing. I read this when it came out -- I thought I had written a review --no? It's holding - all these years later -a lasting wonderful reading impression. The culture -the relationships: struggles and love -the foods - it was all delicious.
View all 6 comments. Mothers and daughters nearly always keep secrets from each other. But at some point in life the secrets need to be told Winnie, Pearl's mother, faces this dilemma.
Winnie's dearest friend Helen is threatening to tell Pearl all of the secrets of Winnie's early years in China. So Winnie decides to tell Pearl her life story before Helen does. Because of course Helen would not tell it correctly anyway. But Pearl has a secret of her own. Will hearing her mother's secrets give h Secrets. Will hearing her mother's secrets give her the courage to share hers? This book was sometimes quite painful to read.
Readers who are overly sensitive to scenes of abuse of any kind may not be able to deal with parts of this story. We see what Winnie lived through because of her arranged marriage to a complete jerk; and from the war in China in the 's and 40's. She suffered immensely but did have a few triumphs at times and somehow held onto a deep-down core of strength that perhaps surprised even herself. Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward.
But you have to have the courage to take that first step, and trust that the luck will follow your path. I think Winnie did this the best way she could. I hope Pearl learns to do the same. I promised my mother that I would take her this book in May. She recently discovered Tan's work when she read The Bonesetter's Daughter. We are planning a book swap. It will be fun to discuss them after reading, because we have discovered a bit of a secret between ourselves lately.
Every so often we both actually like the same books! Maybe that means one or the other of us is getting older and smarter? View all 9 comments. Aug 14, Julia rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: mothers and daughters.
Shelves: readitandlovedit. View 1 comment. Oct 29, Jennifer Cole rated it it was amazing. What I learned from this book--my favorite part: "Isn't that how it is when you must decide with your heart?
You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That's not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart.
And I guess in spite of Tan's writing—which is far from mediocre or incompetent—I could not look past the fact that her story was the antithesis of female solidarity.
At first I was taken by Tan's storytelling. The first 40 pages or so, those that take place in the 'present', were enjoyable. We learn that Pearl, a woman in her thirties, has always had a difficult relationship blog tumblr ko-fi For a book published in the 90s The Kitchen God's Wife comes across as strangely outdated.
We learn that Pearl, a woman in her thirties, has always had a difficult relationship with Winnie, her mother. Some of this is due to generational and cultural differences but, as we soon learn, both mother and daughter have kept secrets from each other.
This is where the novel lost me. I find this kind of cheesy melodrama meets misery porn to be exceedingly frustrating. Every female character, with the exception of Grand Auntie Du, is cruel, vain, stupid, ugly, and or ungrateful.
Winnie, on the other hand, is an angel. She is not like other girls. She endures and she suffers because she has aspirations to martyrdom. Given that she is recounting past experiences directly—ie we get a 1st pov—you would think that at one point or another Winnie could express uncertainty over the accuracy of her memories or wonder if others recall things differently. But no! She keeps insisting that 'this is what happened' and that Helen is a liar who remembers things wrong.
And, speaking of Helen, rather than painting a complex and fraught friendship, Tan presents us with the goody two shoes Winnie and the ugly, stupid, and venal Helen who is not only a horrible friend to Winnie but a lousy human being.
Anyway, Winnie recounts her tragic past: her mother abandons her, she is shunned by her wealthy father and raised by cartoonishly wicked relatives. In relating these experiences Winnie alway makes a point of emphasising her inherent goodness and beauty, often by making little digs about women's failings. Winnie ends up marrying a horrible man who possess only vices.
Personally, I prefer more nuanced characters. Tan also often conflates a characters' physical appearance with their personality—so if one has an ugly character they will be indeed 'ugly' on the outside—which feels a tad Maybe it would be more suited to a novel dated from the 19th century than the s. The only sections that were somewhat interesting and whinging-free were the ones that stuck to facts.
For example, when Tan writes details statics and about the Sino-Japanese War as opposed to Winnie's own experiences in it. When she writes of Nanking I felt much more horrified and moved than I was by anything related to Winnie.
Sadly, Winnie's narrative is more intent on dissing on Helen than anything else. I was thinking, Good, even though she is uneducated, she is quick to learn something new. Her plumpness was round and overflowing in uneven spots, more like a steamed dumpling with too much filling leaking out of the sides.
She had thick ankles and large hands, and feet as broad as boat paddles. Sure hon, go on and keep lying to yourself. Winnie never takes any responsibility. Everything is and or always was all Helen's fault. I tell you, that day Hulan showed me her true character. She was not the soft melon head she made everyone believe she was. I'm not so sure about that one Winnie You see! I am not boasting. When Jiaguo got his promotion, Hulan gave herself a promotion too!
In her mind, she was more important than I was. But Hulan did not do this even once. Instead she put more food into her own mouth. She added fat onto her body the same way a person saves gold or puts money into a bank account, something she could use if worse came to worst.
It stayed in our bodies and broke out one day. Maybe for him. Women, with the exception of Winnie, are catty and fake.
Men, with the exception of Winnie's Chinese-American second husband—are stupid, cowardly, or abusive sadists. Other girls Winnie encounters also receive a similar treatment to Helen's one. Winnie sometimes pretends to be nice claiming that she didn't hate a woman before stressing how selfish or unkind that woman was but, in actuality, she is anything but. And now she was almost as dark as a Cantonese!
And yes, sure, Winnie suffers. Her husband is a monster with no redeeming qualities and with the exception of Grand Auntie Du and her American-born husband Thankfully, I bought my copy of this book in a second-hand shop then again, I will never get back the hours I spent reading this.
While I wouldn't recommend this novel to anyone in particular I'm aware that Tan is an extremely popular writer so View 2 comments. Sep 22, Mariah Roze rated it really liked it. This book is an extremely short read.
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