The Kitchen God’s Wife

Amy Tan’s books are based on the lives and experiences of her parents and relatives, who had migrated to the US from China. She was born in Oakland in California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has written several books The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Her 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. Then the story moves to the past as Winnie, the mother talks about her first marriage in China to a pilot named Wen Fu. All these secrets come out only because Auntie Helen, Winnie’s friend, who thinks that she is dying of a brain tumour, threatens to expose the secrets of both mother and daughter.

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 (or death, she does not know the truth) 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. Then he adds: I liked this in you; so unafraid to say what you thought. Then he asks her present opinion on the painting and as she explains why she likes it now, he says:

From now on, he said at last with a stern look, you must consider what your husbands opinions are. Yours do not matter so much anymore (178).

During her 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 and tells Pearl:

But sometimes, when you are afraid, you can talk to her. She will listen. She will wash away everything sad with her tears. She will use her stick to chase away everything bad. See her name: Lady Sorrowfree, happiness winning over bitterness, no regrets in this world. Of course, it’s only superstition, just for fun. But see how fast the smoke rises- oh, even faster when we laugh, lifting our hopes higher and higher (532).

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 and 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.

Amazing Resilience

What will you do if you are diagnosed with cancer at the age of 25? Lance Armstrong was not made to quit, but to fight.

In his inspirational memoir, Lance Armstrong, an American cyclist traces his struggle with cancer, life and the bike. It's not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life celebrates the undaunted courage and resilience of the human soul.

Lance Armstrong was born on September 18, 1970 at Plano, Texas in USA. He is the second rider to win the Tour De France titles in five consecutive years from 1999 to 2003.

He began his career as a cyclist in 1992 when he joined the Motorola Team. He won stages of the Tour De France in 1993 and 1995 but withdrew from three of four Tours attempted from 1993 to 1996.

Immediately after the 1996 Tour, Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. After a series of combats with cancer through surgery and chemotherapy, he came to back into life fighting all odds against his survival.

He made a dramatic comeback by winning the Tour of Luxembourg in 1998. Next year, he attempted the Tour De France and became the second American to win the title for an American team. In 2003 he won his fifth consecutive Tour de France, thereby setting his name against the cycling champion Miguel Indurain.

A moving tale about life and survival, written in a direct style stating the facts, this book is a token of hope against the killer cancer. He fought cancer with the same spirit that he showed in mastering the bike on difficult terrain and emerged champion.

Pensiamento Fantastico: The Strange Library

 The novel The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami narrates the story of a boy on a visit to the library. He is a dutiful reader and library-user who returns his books on time. He wants to find out how taxes were collected in the Ottomon empire and because such a thought strikes his mind, he wants to find out more about it. On enquiring about it, he is directed to a special section of the library. 

 

He meets a strange old man who assists him by bringing him three thick tomes on the subject-The Ottoman Tax System, The Diary of an Ottoman Tax Collector, and Tax Revolts and Their Suppression in the Ottoman Turkish Empire- and lets him read them on the condition that he should sit in the library and read them. 

He tells the old man that his mother will get upset if he doesn’t return home on time just like the time when he was bitten by a big black dog. The old man is furious that the boy wants to go home in spite of the assistance that he has provided and reminiscences about the time when he was a boy. The buy promises to sit and read for thirty minutes and he is taken to a “Reading Room”, an enormous labyrinth in the basement of the library. 

He meets  a sheep man who makes good doughnuts and obeys all the orders of the Old man. He discovers that the Old man wants to eat his brains and when he asks the reason for that the sheep man replies because brains packed with knowledge are yummy and grainy at the same time. 

A girl comes in bringing him a sumptuous meal and he is struck by her beauty. She can only speak with her hands and she tells him that her vocal cords were destroyed when she was a child. He finds that the library has turned out be a prison and he is not able to get out. He finds that the sheep man and the beautiful girl belong to two different worlds and that at times their worlds collide and overlap with each other. 

He worries about his mother and his pet magpie. As if to make his fears true he is held a prisoner and his pet magpie is eaten by a dog before his very eyes.  What happens to the boy? 

A little Kafkaesque and absurd, the novel captures an atmosphere similar to The Trial and brings in a sense of terror to the act of  visiting a library. In spite of the  way in which it portrays absurdity, this illustrated novella can make you feel hungry with its pictures of delicacies! 

Images: 

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Yann Martel: The Apostle of the Other

If you are an Israeli, you should imagine yourself a Palestinian. Then you will understand why the Palestinians are angry. If you’re a Palestinian, you should make the effort of imagining yourself an Israeli, and then you will understand why the Israelis are afraid. If you’re a man and you become a woman, you understand. If you’re white and you imagine yourself black, etc. 

Yann Martel can rightly be called the Apostle of the Other because through his writing he has tried to explore the Other. He says that “in meeting the other that you start to understand, first, that you are different, and then how you are different”. His fiction has always been an attempt to travel through the strange consciousness of the Other with the aims to understand and to empathise.

Born in Salamanca in Spain in 1963 as the son of Canadian diplomats, Martel spent his childhood in Costa Rica, Spain, Mexico and Canada. After graduating in philosophy, he worked as a tree planter, dishwasher and security guard till he took up writing as a full time career. Now he has settled in Montreal with his partner Alice Kuipers and son Theo.

For Martel, storytelling is a way in which the human experience of living in this world is communicated to one’s fellow beings through the unique human tool of language. Without sharing of experiences, a human has no identity; without love, there can never be stories. As Martel says in the Big Think Interview, “the saddest thing in human terms, is to have a human being who has no stories” as “the human who has no stories is someone who has not been loved and has not been able to love”.

His fiction focuses a great deal upon the people who are robbed of their basic dignity. However, he extends his concern to animals as well because he denies the anthropocentric view of Western religion and culture. He points that the Other is important in defining what is normal and also for locating one’s own identity in the world.

His first book was collection of short stories Seven Stories in 1993 but though it was not a grand success, one of the stories was awarded the Journey Prize. Later this book was edited and republished as The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and Other Stories (1993). There are four stories in this collection namely “Manners of Dying”, “The Mirror Machine”, “The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American composer John Morton” and “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios”. They are strange stories that deal with the modern experience of life in the midst of illness, death and grief.

Self (1996) was Martel’s first novel and it had for its protagonist a nameless boy who wakes up one morning to find that he has become a woman. However, the protagonist is still attracted to women and is confused by the shift in gender. However, after remaining a woman for seven years, the protagonist turns back into a woman when raped by a neighbor. Martel sympathises with women who undergo a very personal holocausts called rape, which robs them of their basic human dignity. However, Martel explores the gendered Other and also the question of whether the mind has any gender.

Life of Pi (2001) that fetched him the coveted Booker Prize in 2002 is a fantastical tale of Piscine Molitor Patel, a sixteen year old Indian boy who travels with his family to Canada by sea and is shipwrecked in the Pacific along with a spotted hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, a female orangutan and a 450lb Royal Bengal Tiger. There are also two versions of the same story of cannibalism, one with animals and one without them. The animal version is a fantastic one; but the real version is grim and terrible. However, Martel used animals as characters solely for artistic purposes but then began to get interested in animals for their own sake and also for the wonder that they provide.

We Ate the Children Last (2004) is a collection of short stories that deal with medical breakthroughs and their consequences. The environmental Other is considered in this work as human experiments such as an animal to human transplant operation can wreck the environment in unforeseen ways. The stories are dark glimpses into the advances in science and technology juxtaposed against the need for protecting the environment. He advocates prudence in animal-human experiments as the products of these could be more devastating to the world at large.

Beatrice and Virgil published (2010) is a postmodernist novel in which the writer Henry L’Hote meets a taxidermist named Henry, who gives him a manuscript of a play featuring Beatrice, a donkey and Virgil, a howler monkey living on a large shirt in the shape of country. The shirt on which they live is affected by what they call the Horrors. As they travel around the shirt, Beatrice and Virgil tell each other little stories and folk tales, share experiences of food and try to find the right words, expressions and signs to represent the Horrors. The novel is an allegory that works at a primary level to mean the Holocaust and at a deeper level to mean cruelty to animals. Martel condemns both genocide and the killing of animals as both violate the right to live.

Martel’s attempts at being an Apostle of the Other was not limited to his fiction. He was also involved in a book project What is Stephen Harper Reading? from 2007 to 2011, in which he sent the Prime Minister of Canada one book every two weeks with his letters, book selections and responses received to a website devoted to the project. He made his intentions clear when he said in the Big Think Interview that “to lead you must read, because that nourishes your vision”. Though the Canadian Prime Minister did not respond in any way to Martel’s project, consolation and encouragement came in an unexpected manner when the American President Barack Obama sent Martel a handwritten note describing how Life of Pi has greatly influenced his life.