Soul friend

Compassion

Health

Hope

Pensiamento Fantastico: The Kitchen God’s Wife

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. 

Absence

 

 

 

It seems like ages ago since we walked together in the rains. When you looked at me, it was as if a world had moved and a new chapter began in our epic story. You and I have changed faces, shapes and lives altogether in the meantime. 

 

In those days, your name was a chant that I would utter from morning till I lie down at night, imagining your arms around me.In those days, being away from you was never an agony for you were always around; at least I was so sure of your heart’s desire to be with me all the time. 

 

Now, eons later, I wither in the agony of your absence, howling at times, weakened by a love that needs togetherness as much as it needs assurance.Now, a desire to be with you overwhelms every feeling that I have ever known, much to my angst.

Bitterness

This little life has known ups and downs and plateaus. There were moments of great strife when the mind showed great courage and lived life to the fullest. Slump was the result when there was nothing to fight for and normal life was lived when days were all the same with nothing eventful between waking up and going to sleep.

Occasionally, there were those nightmarish times when it turned into nothing but a series of misfortunes one after another, when the heart had to face troubles all by itself and there was nobody who could help or listen. It was such a point of life, a quieter me evolved, who does not explain herself to anybody or anything and is happy with whatever life drops in these outstretched pair of hands.

How will you know, who became a tormented soul so late unlike me, one who has tormented each and every one of your listeners every day with your contagious chalice of bitterness about being open-minded and living in the moment? I have my days of bitterness; but looking carefully I understand that all these words of bitterness were a whiff from your putrefaction.