The Kitchen God's Wife

About The Kitchen God's Wife

Introduction

Since Tan realized such phenomenal success with her first published book, The Joy Luck Club, a reader might assume she could immediately go on to write another blockbuster novel. Our literature, however, abounds with memorable first novels by authors who never published another successful book. Appreciation of The Kitchen God's Wife can be enhanced by learning how Tan carried out the awesome task of its creation.

Tan admits to feeling daunted by the success of The Joy Luck Club as she approached the writing of her next book. She shuffled through six plots and wearying weeks of book tours, speeches, volunteer projects, and literary luncheons. Finally, she settled in with incense and recorded music over earphones — plus a telephone-answering machine to assure herself of the privacy and calm she needed. In "Angst and the Second Novel," a 1991 essay for Publishers Weekly, she confided that writing demands "persistence imposed by a limited focus." To that end, she fenced herself in as if she were "a priest, a nun, a convict serving a life's sentence."

Despite her concentration, self-doubts led her through a nightmarish procession of characters, plots, and discarded false starts — a tale about a girl orphaned in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, one set in Mongolia as described in the Manchu language, another about a potent elixir that accidentally poisons a magistrate, and yet another about the daughter of a missionary to China in the 1930s.

In "Lost Lives of Women," a Life magazine essay, Tan divulges a maternal background with obvious parallels to this novel's plot. Daisy Tan's mother, Jingmei, came from a refined background and married a poor scholar who died from influenza before he could assume a worthy job in a magistrate's office. Unprotected as a widow in a fiercely patriarchal society, Jingmei was raped and forced to join the rapist's household as a concubine shrouded in shame and dishonor.

To preserve her son's dignity, Jingmei abandoned him and immigrated with nine-year-old Daisy (called "Baobei," or Treasure) to an island off the Shanghai coast. After giving birth to a second son, Jingmei killed herself by concealing a lethal dose of opium in a New Year's rice cake. Daisy related Jingmei's story to Amy to illustrate the powerlessness of women in China in the 1920s.

Tan developed a talkative woman character but lost her focus until it occurred to her to make the story a gift — from herself as speaker to listener Daisy, who inspired the exchange after wondering aloud what her daughter would remember about her. In the reflective interview for Publishers Weekly, she claims:

I had to fight for every single character, every image, every word. And the story is, in fact, about a woman who does the same thing: she fights to believe in herself. . . . She is no innocent. She sees her fears, but she no longer lets them chase her.

Daisy has equated Amy's muse with the ghost of Jingmei, Amy's much maligned, but indomitable grandmother. When Amy and her mother visited Daisy's brother (the son that Jingmei had abandoned in Shanghai) in Beijing, China, Tan and her uncle agreed that Jingmei "is the source of strength running through our family." This verbal tribute moved Daisy to tears, releasing anxieties and sorrows of her early life.

In a sidebar accompanying an excerpt from The Kitchen God's Wife, published in McCall's, Tan says that the transfer of hope from mother to daughter is the key to the story. The novel satisfied Tan's expectations to "write something deeper and wider [than The Joy Luck Club] . . . something that examines many of the toughest issues in my life" — and of her mother's life. The book is Tan's effort to dispel the ghosts of her mother's wretched marriage and her experiences in China during the war with Japan. Tan dedicated the book "to my mother, Daisy Tan, and her happy memories of my father, John . . . and my brother Peter . . . with love and respect."

In its paralleling of real and fictional elements, the book resembles a roman á clef, a shadow saga of the Tan family:

• the resemblance of fictional heroine Winnie Louie to real-life Daisy Tan and the resemblance of the malignant Wen Fu to Jingmei's unnamed rapist-husband
• the dual tragedies of Daisy's and Winnie's mothers, whose hopes are destroyed by men who devalue them, treating them not as human beings, but as pleasure-giving possessions
• the social mores of a patriarchal society that spawn feudal marriages intended to enrich or ennoble the groom and his family
• the chaotic wartime circumstances that force change on an outmoded government as well as on its citizens
• the settlement of the Tan family and of Winnie and Jimmy Louie in California before the Communists halt emigration from China
• the reunion of Chinese family members with Asian-American relatives who dimly appreciate their relatives' struggles
• the revelation of early episodes that shed light both on past hurts and debilitating regrets and on the disunity and misunderstandings that flourish in the present.

On one hand, The Kitchen God's Wife echoes the oral foundation, the confessional style, the theme of alienation, sweeping war scenarios, and mother-daughter situations of The Joy Luck Club. On the other hand, it has merited comparison to the darkly dramatic novels of Russian literary giants Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Boris Pasternak.

The strength of The Kitchen God's Wife and its predecessor is Tan's skill at delineating wisps of love and admiration in the ragged, indirect, yet hurtful set-tos and silences between mother and daughter and at revealing the family secrets that chew like canker worms into the most vulnerable recesses of the family's heart.

The completed book sold quickly to Putnam, the publisher of her first book. The Literary Guild purchased distribution rights for $425,000, and pre-publication sales were made to five foreign publishers. Neither her readers nor her publisher have been disappointed: The Kitchen God's Wife held its place on Publishers Weekly's list of hardcover bestsellers for thirty-eight weeks. By the spring of 1991, The Kitchen God's Wife topped a quarter million sales as it headed into paperback for even wider distribution. It was nominated for a Bay Area Book Reviewers award and was selected as 1991 editor's choice by Booklist.

The financial as well as the critical success of The Kitchen God's Wife squelched fears that Amy Tan had already published her best work with The Joy Luck Club.

Narrative Structure

The entire novel is narrated in first person by two central characters: Pearl and her mother, Winnie.

Chapters 1 and 2 are narrated by Pearl Louie Brandt, a contemporary Asian-American woman in her forties. The events she describes are mostly in present time and are narrated in present tense.

Chapters 3 and 4 are narrated by Pearl's Chinese mother, Winnie Louie, as she begins to think about her family, her past, and her need to confide in her daughter.

Chapters 5 through 24 are narrated as if being told by Winnie to Pearl. This is the story of Winnie's life, most of it described through flashbacks, with occasional asides and editorial comments by the narrator. (Winnie's Chinese name in most of these flashbacks is Weili.)

Chapter 25 is in present time again, narrated by Pearl immediately following her mother's story.

Chapter 26 is narrated by Winnie in the days after she tells her story to Pearl.

Chronology of Historical and Fictional Events

Throughout The Kitchen God's Wife, Tan interweaves critical events of Chinese history with the fictional experiences of her characters. The historical events are not simply employed to provide color and realism, but are integral influences on the story itself. The chronology outlined below includes several historical events which are not mentioned in the novel but which play a significant role in the novel's historical and fictional events — for example, the U.S. entry into World War II and the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima.