Be nice to your mum! (The Kitchen God's Wife - Amy Tan)

Member Name: gibbon

Product:	The Kitchen God's Wife - Amy Tan
Date:	02/05/01 (215 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Absorbing and emotional

Disadvantages: Crying on an aeroplane

This novel has not received the critical acclaim of the Joy Luck Club but shows her writing at it's best.

The story revolves around a mother/ daughter relationship which forms the basis for most of her novels. In this novel, the daughter, Pearl is happily married with a family but in many ways distant from her mother. She has MS but has not told her mother because she fears her reaction. A family friend's illness is the catalyst for the sharing of their secrets. However, her mother has kept many secrets about her past from her and the novel sensitively addresses the difficulties of the parent /child relationship compounded by cross cultural differences.

The novel is split into 4 sections, of differing length, the introduction through the eyes of the daughter, the substance of the novel is the mother sharing her past with her daughter, the terrible nature of her past life is softened by her humour and candour. The conclusion is then shared between the mother and daughter. I was impressed by how Tan managed to seamlessly change the voice of the narrator throughout the novel, she believably wrote in the voice of each person, and it made each character fuller.

Tan's portrayal of the Chinese mother and her American daughter are outstanding and the details she puts in make it so true to life. I've said this before in my review of White Teeth, but this won't stop me saying it again. I find the pigeon holing of some novelists into ethnic or multi-cultural writers quite patronising as it reinforces the idea that all other novelists write from a neutral position. Unsurprisingly, it seems to happen more to female novelists. This book although having specific meaning to me culturally has things to say to a much wider audience particularly about oppression and the difficult choices people have to make. I find the portrayals very true to life having a Chinese mother, though I'm not American (thankfully). I must admit t
hat some of my mother's idiosyncracies and attitudes have been explained to me through Tan's work. I always thought that my mother was a bit strange! It's made me have a lot more empathy for my mother and in some instances guilty for my attitude towards her during my childhood. The ability of Tan to make me reflect, laugh and sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable through her fiction makes her one of my favourite novelists.

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