I don't know how to begin describing this one. Winnie, our true MC, starts out barely sustaining a connection with her estranged Westernised daughter, Pearl. Among other hurts, Winnie holds it against her own daughter for refusing to cry at her father's funeral. Could this be nature, nurture, or something more beneath the surface?
After some brief cultural clashes (some I really relate to, like the bit about parenting), Winnie dives deep into the traumatic story of her life amidst WW2 and living in a patriarchal, collective society. All this is for her own closure and to be upfront to Pearl onwho her real father is.
Winnie is the titular Kitchen God's Wife. Just like in the OG legend, her sacrifices and support are forgotten and she gets no chance of honour unlike the Kitchen God and her charismatic but deadbeat husband, Wen Fu. It takes a lot of patience with the prose to link this allegory to her life, but Amy's writing is well worth my time.
I admire Amy Tan for writing strong women who have that quiet strength, wit and complexity while keeping them realistically vulnerable at the same time. I nvr related much to Chinese culture, much like Pearl but I liked how Amy visualized the ornate mansions, simple life in rural villages ….The misty scenery on the mountain otw to Kunming is breathtaking as I think of it!
Wen Fu, Winnie's first husband, commits every type of recognised abuse (financial, psychological, you name it), but Amy writes theSA sceneswith enough sensitivity and euphemisms like Asians tend to use when circling this sensitive topic. Wen Fu may come off as a caricature the longer you read, but it can't be denied that the cultural bias favouring men in traditional Chinese mindsets enables his narcissistic personality. The misogyny is even more apparent when Wen Fu yells that he didn't care if his infant daughter died. He constantly tells his son to pipe down, but his mistreatment doesn't go farther than that.
The friendship btwn Winnie and Helen is a tangled web indeed. Helen is presented as the talkative, ditzy, gluttony klutz, but has her own moments where she finally gives back to the relationship mostly carried by Winnie. Helen admittedly has street smarts, such as when she had to rescue Winnie from a panicked riot in Nanking and confronting Wen Fu for the last time. Auntie Du is not just the person we send off in the beginning; she plays a key role to Winnie's freedom from hell.
Helen's memory and narration can be unreliable at times. But she plays bluff with the reader with her tall tale of having a brain tumour so that she can blackmail help repair Winnie and Pearl's relationship by making them tell each other their secrets, no matter how sordid. Or she'd do it herself, with her own spin on things!
I recommend this book if you're interested in diverse authors, historical fiction and plots with plausible redemption arcs.
by emoduke101