Amy Tan’s novels serve as cultural
documents that describe the immigrant experience in terms of communality and
identity. They contain the customs and rituals of China that might get lost in
the new country in the process of cultural assimilation.
The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) is her second novel and presents
a mother-daughter relationship complicated by secrets- the mother withholds information
about the daughter’s real parentage while the daughter hides her progressive
multiple sclerosis from her mother.
The novel begins in the present time when
the daughter Pearl is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Her mother Winnie
reveals about her first marriage in China to a pilot named Wen Fu. Winnie had
lost her mother when she was a child and was brought up by her uncle’s family.
She discloses her sorrowful past, her unhappy marriage, the deaths of her three
children, her meeting Jimmy Louie, her escape from her first marriage and her
marriage to Jimmy, whom Pearl calls father.
Her bitter experiences at home after her
mother’s escape make her angry towards her father. Later, when her marriage is
fixed, her father asks her to spend a week with him. He asks her opinion about
a painting in his study that she used to dislike. He asks her to take into
consideration her husband’s opinion in the future.
During times of trouble, she is helped by
Auntie Du, Jimmy Louie and Helen. She was like the Kitchen God’s wife, who got
no credit for her faithfulness and loyalty to her husband. Winnie, however
decides to move and discards the image of the Kitchen God’s wife from her home
because she feels that now that she has divorced her husband Wen Fu, this God
has no value for her.
Once the secrets are out, both women try
to come to terms with what they are entrusted with. Winnie wants to take Pearl
to China to find a cure for her incurable disease. She brings the altar that
Auntie Du had left for Pearl and finds a new goddess for it, a goddess with no
name, obviously a factory error. She names the goddess Sorrowfree.
Tan portrays the miserable life of
Winnie, who leaves China in search of a new life. She shows the patriarchal
Chinese society that values boys over girls does nothing when a man hits his
wife in public. There is no one to stand up for the woman as it is considered
to be her fate. Tan also critiques the generation gap that comes out of the
prejudices that the old and the young feel toward each other. In the novel, the
mother-daughter relationship becomes warm only when all secrets are let out and
the prejudices overcome.
