The Kitchen God's Wife
Amy Tan, 1991
Penguin Group
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143038108
Summary
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 terible truth even Helen does not know.
And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events tha led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.
The Kitchen God's Wife is "a beautiful book" (Los Angeles Times) from the author of bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement, and the new memoir, Where the Past Begins. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Also named—En-Mai Tan
• Birth—February 15, 1952
• Where—Oakland, California, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., San Jose State University
• Currently—San Francisco, California
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American writer, many of whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989) brought her fame and has remained one of her most popular works. It was adapted to film in 1993.
Early yeaars
Tan is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her father was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who traveled to the US to escape the Chinese Revolution. Although she was born in Oakland, California, her family moved a number of times throughout her childhood.
When she was fifteen, her father and older brother Peter both died of brain tumors within six months of each other. Tan subsequently moved with her mother and younger brother, John Jr., to Switzerland, where she finished high school at the Institut Monte Rosa in Montreux.
It was during this period that Tan learned about her mother's previous marriage in China, where she had four children (a son who died in toddlerhood and three daughters). Her mother had left her husband and children behind in Shanghai — an incident that became the basis for Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club. In 1987, she and her mother traveled to China to meet her three half-sisters for the first time.
Tan enrolled at Linfield College in Oregon, a Baptist college of her mother's choosing. After she dropped out to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College in California, she and her mother stopped speaking for six months. Tan ended up marrying the young man in 1974 and subsequently earned both her B.A. and M.A. in English and linguistics from San Jose State University. She began her doctoral studies in linguistics at University of California-Santa Cruz and Berkeley, but abandoned them in 1976.
Career
While in school, Tan worked odd jobs — serving as a switchboard operator, carhop, bartender, and pizza maker. Eventually, she started writing freelance for businesses, working on projects for AT&T, IBM, Bank of America, and Pacific Bell, writing under non-Chinese-sounding pseudonyms.
In 1985, she turned to fiction, publishing her first story in 1986 in a small literary journal. It was later reprinted in Seventeen magazine and Grazia. On her return from the China trip with her mmother, where she had met her half-sisters, Tan learned her agent had signed a contract for a book of short stories, only three of which were written. That book eventually became The Joy Luck Club and launchd Tan's literary career.
Extras
In addition to her novels (see below), Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series airing on PBS. She has also appeared on PBS in a short spot encouraging children to write.
Tan is a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band consisting of published writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Matt Groening, Dave Barry and Stephen King, among others. In 1994 she co-wrote, with the other band members, Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America With Three Chords and an Attitude.
In 1998, Tan contracted Lyme disease, which went undiagnosed for a few years. As a result, she suffers from epileptic seizures due to brain lesions. Tan co-founded LymeAid 4 Kids, which helps uninsured children pay for treatment, and wrote about her life with Lyme disease in a 2013 op-ed piece in the New York Times.
Tan is still married to the guy she ran off with from Linfield College and married in 1974. He is Louis DeMattei, a lawyer, and the two live in San Francisco.
Books
1989 - The Joy Luck Club
1991 - The Kitchen God's Wife
1995 - The Hundred Secret Senses
2001 - The Bonesetter's Daughter
2003 - The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (Essays)
2005 - Saving Fish from Drowning
2013 - The Valley of Amazement
2017 - Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Remarkable…mesmerizing…compelling.… An entire world unfolds in Tolstoyan tide of event and detail.… Give yourself over to the world Ms. Tan creates for you.
New York Times Book Review
A beautiful book.… [W]hat fascinates in The Kitchen God's Wife is not only the insistent storytelling but the details of Chinese life and tradition; not only how people lived but how their sensibility shines through, most notably in their speech. Amy Tan has a command with language in which event and concrete perception jump into palpable metaphor, and images from the daily world act like spiritual agents.
Los Angeles Times
Tan's mesmerizing second novel, again a story that a Chinese emigre mother tells her daughter, received a PW boxed review, spent 18 weeks on PW 's hardcover bestseller list and was a Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selection in cloth.
Publishers Weekly
[TKGW] shows Tan's growth as a writer.… Tan is a gifted natural storyteller. The rhythms of Winnie's story are spellbinding and true, without the contrivance common in many modern novels. Highly recommended. —Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Library Journal
[P]owerful…absorbing…. Some YAs may find the beginning a bit slow, but this beautifully written, heartrending, sometimes violent story with strong characterzation will captivate their interest to the very last page. —Nancy Bard, Thomas Jefferson Sci-Tech, Fairfax County, VA
School Library Journal
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Kitchen God's Wife … then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe the relationship between Pearl and Winnie?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: Pearl thinks of "the enormous distance that separates" her from her mother, preventing them from sharing "the most important matters" of their lives. She asks, "How did this happen?" By the novel's end, can she answer that question? Can you answer it?
3. Follow-up to Question 2: What role does the secret box play in keeping mother and daughter at bay? How do the misunderstandings continue to pile up over the years?
4. Talk about the corrosive effects of secrets. Consider that keeping secrets is ironic: withoholding information is meant to protect either the secret-keeper or someone who might be hurt or angered by the knowledge — yet it frequently ends up harming both parties. What makes secrets so incidious? Think of the secrets you have keep ... or were once kept from you.
5. What is Helen's role in the novel? What is her relationship with Winnie and with Pearl? Consider that she is a link between past and present and between mother and daughter. Why does Helen decide to reveal Winnie's secrets? Is she right to so?
6. What is the symbolic significance of cleaning and sweeping in the novel, in particular when Helen tells Winnie that she is going to reveal Winnie's secrets?
7. What affect did the departure of her mother have on Winnie (then called Jiang Weili) in both the immediate aftermath and for decades later?
8. Follow-up to Question 7: Talk about the symbolic/psychological significance of Winnie's attempt to clean her mother's portrait, only to wipe off half of her mother's face. How does that act of erasure parallel Winnie's memory of her mother?
9. In what way does Winnie's history — as well as the idiomatic language and quirkiness of the characters — resemble the old folktale of the Kitchen God's Wife …and why might Amy Tan have decided to use it as the novel's title?
10. Straddling two cultures is an important motif in Tan's novel. How are both Winnie and Pearl affected by "foreign" influences — one in China and the other, years later, in America?
(Questions adapted, in part, from Sparknotes.com. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution to both Sparknotes and LitLovers. Thanks.)