Huntley 16)
The imagination and the old standards and emphasis on luck and fate either good or bad drives the narrative account of Pearl's mother in the work, as she navigates through the traditions of the culture of women plotting to alter their own fates and in so doing changing the fate of others. "Tan first presents in the Kitchen God's Wife the indigenous informants "Winnie Louie, Helen (or Hulan), and Grand Auntie Du" in a light as unsavory..."
Ma 18) in one passage of the childhood narrative of her mother this can be seen clearly, when Pearl's mother speaks of losing her luck to Peanut, her coveted cousin, who was supposed to marry a local boy but shirked him off on Pearl's Mother and the marriage was one that greatly challenged her for years;
No I'm not being superstitious. I am only saying that's how it happened. And how can you say luck and chance are the same thing? Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward...If you don't take a chance, someone else will give you his luck. And if you get bad luck, then you need to take another chance to turn things from bad to good." (149-150)
Additionally the relationship between Helen (Hulan) and Winnie was also one that was cemented through mutuality of situation, and bad circumstances, rather than through marriage, as Pearl had been told throughout her childhood. "I met Helen maybe two weeks after we arrived in Hangchow. She was also very young, maybe eighteen, and I heard she was also newly married no, not to my brother...so you see Helen is not my sister-in-law. She is not your real auntie." (Tan 211-213) in fact all of the important characters in the life of Winnie and her daughter Pearl turn out to be different people than Pearl was told as a child and who she still as an adult believed them to be, and markedly with...
Helen, seemingly an illiterate scatterbrain, adroitly fabricates the lie of her brain tumor to secretly coerce the mother and the daughter to confide in each other the unsettling truth. Finally, Winnie appears to be unreasonable and "negative-thinking" (152) only because of her horrible sufferings at the hands of her monstrous first husband, Wen Fu. In fact, the persevering spirit of Winnie gradually unfolds in this novel until she becomes all but a deity herself," "the Kitchen God's Wife."
Ma 18)
The foundations of the work express gender and generational conflicts that decentralize the early characterization of these aged women by their daughters and make them into the real whole characters that they are, with all their modern quirks being explained by cultural sensitivity and historical tragedy.
Amy Tan's the Kitchen God's Wife is a remarkable work of fiction that has many truisms associated with the lives of Chinese immigrant women and their Americanized daughters. The family Tan describes could be any Chinese immigrant family, or at least that is the feeling the reader gets from the narrative. The lives of these women may seem sensational when taken out of context but woven into this narrative they are at once sensational and very, very real.
Works Cited
Huntley, E.D. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Ma, Sheng-Mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian-American and Asian Diaspora Literatures / . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God's Wife. New York: Putnam, 1991.
