The Kitchen God's Wife: Bridging Generational and Cultural Divides

Introduction: Cultural Tradition and Modern Assimilation

Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife is a moving tale of a daughter finding the roots of her own undiscovered heritage, presented through a winding juxtaposition between cultural tradition and modern assimilation. The work reaffirms Tan's tradition of building narrative through cultural expressions of change and strong character development across both young and old generations. As scholar E. D. Huntley notes, "In the wake of Tan's first success [Joy Luck Club] came a second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, published in 1991, and inspired to a large extent by Daisy Tan's life in China" (11). The superimposition of Tan's mother's real-life story, with its colorful expressions of life in the old country and life in the modern world, is woven through pages of realistic narrative infused with Tan's witty sense of character, tragedy, and loss as seen through an intergenerational view—a perspective that few other authors possess.

Understanding one's history and the perspective of that history is a challenge even for the most astute child, but when that history is so characteristically different from the one being lived by the author, as in the case of east-versus-west connections, interpretations can be lost. Amy Tan skillfully reconnects those disconnections, especially through a woman's context of change. Tan begins often with the expression of narrative characters as having an almost complete lack of desire to connect with and understand the older generation, and ends with a full emotional bridging that was years in the making. The collective communication is complete even though it is often stilted by interjections of the modern.

Talk Story as Narrative Strategy

In Tan's novels, talk story is the narrative strategy for those characters whose ties to Chinese tradition remain strong. In their attempts to explain their lives to their daughters, the mothers in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, and Kwan in The Hundred Secret Senses, draw on traditional oral forms to shape their stories and to disguise the urgency and seriousness with which they are attempting to transmit to their daughters (or a much younger sister in Kwan's case) the remnants of a culture that is fading even from their own lives. Evidence of the fragility of that culture lies not only in the jarring intrusions of Americanisms into the Chinese-English patois of the older generation, but more significantly in the fact that the stories of the younger generation are devoid of all but the faintest traces of an old world's oral literature.

Those traces consist mainly of wispy recollections of stories and admonitory maxims heard in childhood and long forgotten. As Huntley explains, "Those traces consist mainly of wispy recollections of stories and admonitory maxims heard in childhood and forgotten long since" (32-33). There is little more compelling than the reconnection of people who share a past but who see a very different future because of the difficulty the generations have in communicating the past to present generations and, more importantly, the difficulty the present generation has in hearing the messages of such a foreign expression of life.

The older generations in Tan's works frequently and realistically were forced to make life-altering decisions that only years of safety in America can buffer enough to allow to come out. These include unhappy and often violent marriages, unknown and often long-dead children, and family relationships altered in traditions to make possible the immigration to America. The difficulties of World War II in China, arranged marriages between women and men who barely knew each other, and accounts of Daisy's first husband—to whom she always referred as "that bad man"—form the emotional substrate of the novel. One story that particularly intrigued Tan was her mother's account of a friend who was fleeing from the approaching Japanese troops. The friend was carrying all of her belongings in bags that she finally began dropping one by one as her strength gave out and the bags grew more difficult to carry (Huntley 16).

Generational Communication and Hidden Truths

The imagination and the old standards and emphasis on luck and fate—either good or bad—drive the narrative account of Pearl's mother 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. In one passage of the childhood narrative of her mother, this becomes clear 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. That marriage greatly challenged her for years. In her own words, Pearl's mother explains: "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" (Tan 149-150).

Additionally, the relationship between Helen (Hulan) and Winnie was cemented through mutuality of situation and bad circumstances, rather than through marriage, as Pearl had been told throughout her childhood. Winnie explains: "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 far greater significance than she had ever imagined.

Conclusion: The Kitchen God's Wife as Immigrant Narrative

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.