A Wife's Place is in the Kitchen (The Kitchen God's Wife - Amy Tan)

Member Name: happybunny75

Product:	The Kitchen God's Wife - Amy Tan
Date:	03/12/01 (413 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Both Comical and harrowing, Excellent characterisation

Disadvantages: None

Well, I have been busy reading recently and have found some real gems of novels, which truly deserve to be more renowned than they are.

Alas, from the pen of Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club) I’ve just finished reading The Kitchen God’s Wife. Let me explain this rather obscure title.

In China there are many gods representing many different things: Money gods, Love gods to name a couple. The Kitchen God, according to one of our narrators of the novel, originates from a story from China about a farmer named Zhang.

Zhang was married to a hardworking wife named Guo. Because of her hard work, his farm thrived, but despite this Zhang was not contented. He one day brought home a beautiful woman called Lady Li and ordered his wife to cook for her, whilst he had a bit on the side (if you know what I mean). Lady Li eventually drove Zhang’s wife out of the house so that she and Guo’s husband could live in perfect bliss.

After a period of time the farm went rapidly downhill and all Zhang’s good luck disappeared and Lady Li ran off with another man. A destitute beggar, Zhang went from household to household asking for food, until one day he fell down and waited to die. When he awoke he was lying in a kitchen and was told by a woman tending to him that a wonderful woman who would help anyone had brought him there. This wonderful woman walked into the kitchen and Zhang was horrified to see that it was his wife, Guo. In shame he tried to find somewhere to hide, but could only find the kitchen fire, and so jumped into it and perished.

In heaven, the Jade Emperor learnt of Zhang’s story and exclaimed that because Zhang “Had the courage to admit that he was wrong” he would become the Kitchen God. He would report each year to the emperor,those who deserved good luck because of their generosity and those who deserved bad luck due to their greed.

And so I conclude….

Na, I know
this is a lengthy introduction to The Kitchen God’s Wife, but an allusion that is central to the themes of the novel. So, I’ll begin…

The predominant plot of the novel is centred on the relationship between a Chinese mother and her American daughter.

Pearl, married with children and born and raised in America has a fraught relationship with her Chinese mother who emigrated to America at the time of the Chinese revolution. Both women have secrets, which they have kept from one another but are forced to confess. What follows, is a naïve, funny but harrowing story by Pearl’s mother Winnie, of her life in China before Pearl was born: A story of fate, abuse, war and strength.

Told using first person narratives, the stories of both Pearl and her mother highlight the strains between ‘mother and daughter’ relationships and that closely guarded secret of a mother’s youth. Tan’s wry humour prevents the novel becoming a novel of slushy sentimentality; a trait I can’t stand in writing.

As with many of Amy Tan’s novels, the reader is engrossed in a different world: the historical and cultural strangeness of China: where women were indisputably born to be married and to obey their husbands, no matter what. Nothing new here, except for the idea of fate shaping a Chinese life. Winnie had accepted her fate, as a punishment for past family misdemeanours. Fortunes and Gods play vital roles in Chinese folklore, but Winnie eventually realises that fate has also got to be procured as well as being awaited.

Thematically, The Kitchen God’s Wife, is an entanglement of Chinese culture and Western ideals. The metaphorical god of the novel provokes a feminist response of ‘why the hell was a man made a god, when he treated his wife so badly?’ Shouldn’t the wife have been made a god? Winnie, herself, asks this and the tide is turned. In fact all the women within the n
ovel challenge this idea, whether they are Chinese by birth or American. It doesn’t make them feminists, just bright enough to know that value comes from a person irrespective of their sex, race or religion.

But why be a god when you can still be alive? Punishment is a strange thing.

Summary: